Brandon Lamb wrote:
Hello, We have started looking into some used inifiniband hardware to up our network from the typical gigabit ethernet to the 10gigabit infiniband stuff. Im curious to hear from anyone that has maybe done this or has been able to see how much of a performance gain there is. My primary interest would be in a replicated setup (5 or so clients and 2 data servers). Our use would be web files and/or mail possibly, both i guess are small files.
Have you done testing with 1Gb networking? Do your storage boxes have enough CPU resource to handle a 10x increase in bandwidth? What about disk I/O? You'll need some pretty fat storage nodes to justify going to 10Gb.
We are also however looking into building xen servers, and looking at designs for do we stick images on local disks or try nas/san solutions, try glusterfs for this maybe?
Considering that virtualized disk I/O performance varies between 10% and 40% of bare metal, you may be lucky and find that using a fuse based fs doesn't actually affect the performance too badly on top of the virtualization overheads.
Good luck. Please report your findings. :) Gordan
