Dale, I hope you have the time to supply a couple more numbers. What do your sar and zpool iostat numbers look like? More importantly what does iostat -cxn 5 look like during peak? For us this is 1100-1300 hours hitting about 40%. Of course this is summertime usage so things are a bit slack here with most students being home, not so much daily class-related chitchat. If this 3511 setup is yielding very similar numbers we may switch array products during our next buildout. Dale Ghent wrote: > On Jul 4, 2007, at 12:59 PM, Vincent Fox wrote: > >> Sun recommends against the 3511 in most literature I read, saying >> that the SATA drives >> are slower and not going to handle as much IOPS loading. But they >> are working out okay >> for you? Perhaps it's just vendor upsell to the more expensive >> 3510FC.... > > It's upselling. These 3511s (two units, each unit comprising of a 3511 > with dual controllers and an attached 3511 JBOD, the head and JBOS > stocked with 250GB and 500GB drives respectively) were recently > decommissioned from database work and did that job well for 1.5 years. > The reliability warnings given by Sun and others are just one way they > try to urge you to go with with FC drives... half the capacity at > twice the cost. Perhaps more performance with FC, yes, but not > persuasively faster for our purposes at least. > >> We are actually doing SAN MultiPath, so hardware paranoia first, and >> then ZFS on top >> of that for even more. > > Similar here, as well. Each of our X4100M2s have a two port Qlogic > 2462 card, with each port connected to a separate switch. Each of our > 3511s are connected to two switches as well, with their LUNs being > advertised out of all host ports. mpxio does its job well here. Each > 3511 is also in separate data centers in separate buildings, with my > SAN covering it all... with ZFS mirroring, we essentially have > real-time replication between two geographically distinct places. If > one data center were to be lost, everyone's mail spool is still fine > in another building and ZFS on the Cyrus servers just sees that as one > side of the mirror going down. > > /dale > > -- > Dale Ghent > Specialist, Storage and UNIX Systems > UMBC - Office of Information Technology > ECS 201 - x51705 > > > ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/ Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twiki List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
