hi, our current servers are suffering from a weird hardware issue that forces us to start over. in short we have two servers with 15 disks at 6TB each, divided into three raid5 arrays for three bricks per server at 22TB per brick. each brick on one server is replicated to a brick on the second server. the hardware issue is that somewhere in the backplane random I/O errors happen when the system is under load. these cause the raid to fail disks, although the disks themselves are perfectly fine. reintegration of the disks causes more load and is therefore difficult. we have been running these servers for at least four years, and the problem only started appearing about three months ago our hostingprovider acknowledged the issue but does not support moving the disks to different servers. (they replaced the hardware but that didn't help) so we need to start over. my first intuition was that we should have smaller servers with less disks to avoid repeating the above scenario. we also previously had issues with the load created by raid resync so we are considering to skip raid alltogether and rely on gluster replication instead. (by compensating with three replicas per brick instead of two) our options are: 6 of these: AMD Ryzen 5 Pro 3600 - 6c/12t - 3.6GHz/4.2GHz 32GB - 128GB RAM 4 or 6 × 6TB HDD SATA 6Gbit/s or three of these: AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 3700 - 8c/16t - 3.6GHz/4.4GHz 32GB - 128GB RAM 6× 14TB HDD SAS 6Gbit/s i would configure 5 bricks on each server (leaving one disk as a hot spare) the engineers prefer the second option due to the architecture and SAS disks. it is also cheaper. i am concerned that 14TB disks will take to long to heal if one ever has to be replaced and would favor the smaller disks. the other question is, is skipping raid a good idea? greetings, martin. ________ Community Meeting Calendar: Schedule - Every 2nd and 4th Tuesday at 14:30 IST / 09:00 UTC Bridge: https://meet.google.com/cpu-eiue-hvk Gluster-users mailing list Gluster-users@xxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
