Jim C. Nasby wrote: > On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 01:56:10AM -0500, Charles Sprickman wrote: > You'll note that I'm being somewhat driven by my OS of choice, FreeBSD. > >>Unlike Solaris or other commercial offerings, there is no nice volume >>management available. While I'd love to keep managing a dozen or so >>FreeBSD boxes, I could be persuaded to go to Solaris x86 if the volume >>management really shines and Postgres performs well on it. > > > Have you looked at vinum? It might not qualify as a true volume manager, > but it's still pretty handy. I am looking very closely at purchasing a SANRAD Vswitch 2000, a Nexsan SATABoy with SATA disks, and the Qlogic iscsi controller cards. Nexsan claims up to 370MB/s sustained per controller and 44,500 IOPS but I'm not sure if that is good or bad. It's certainly faster than the LSI megaraid controller I'm using now with a raid 1 mirror. The sanrad box looks like it saves money in that you don't have to by controller cards for everything, but for I/O intensive servers such as the database server, I would end up buying an iscsi controller card anyway. At this point I'm not sure what the best solution is. I like the idea of having logical disks available though iscsi because of how flexible it is, but I really don't want to spend $20k (10 for the nexsan and 10 for the sanrad) and end up with poor performance. On other advantage to iscsi is that I can go completely diskless on my servers and boot from iscsi which means that I don't have to have spare disks for each host, now I just have spare disks for the nexsan chassis. So the question becomes: has anyone put postgres on an iscsi san, and if so how did it perform? schu
