Christian Herzog put forth on 9/24/2010 12:41 AM: > Do you have any particular/typical > device in mind? I'd like to check it out nonetheless. Almost totally ignoring your current hardware investment and Infiniband back end... I recommend the following for performance, storage density and total storage, ease of configuration and management, reliability, and cost: http://www.nexstor.co.uk/products/3/13/29/526/Disk_Storage/Nexsan/Nexsan_Storage/Nexsan_SATABeast http://www.nexstor.co.uk/products/3/13/29/3537/Disk_Storage/Nexsan/Nexsan_Storage/Nexsan_60_Disks_in_4U_-_Beast_Expansion_Unit Using 2TB drives, the Nexsan SATABeast with two dual port 8Gbit FC controllers combined with the NXS-B60E expansion chassis offers a total of 204TB in only 8U of rack space with an advertised sustained host data rate of 1.2GB/s using both controllers. If your bandwidth needs outweigh your capacity needs, and 1.2GB/s is too low for a total storage back end, simply acquire multiple SATABeasts and forgo the NXS-B60E expansion box. Using 2 Qlogic QLE2564 x8 PCIe Quad port 8Gbit FC HBAs in your front end server would allow multipath redundant connection to one FC port on each controller of 4 SATABeast units. This would yield an advertised sustained aggregate data rate of 4.8GB/s between the front end server and 336TB of storage across 168 disks in 16U total rack space. If you have an FC convergence card in your Mellanox IB switch with 4-8 FC ports, you could forgo the HBAs in the front end server and simply jack the SATABeast(s) directly into the IB fabric. This would definitely increase configuration complexity. I've never done it so I'd be of no help. However, it would allow you to assign LUNs on the SATABeasts directly to any hosts on the IB network, assuming all the necessary software is installed and configurable on said hosts enabling their IB HBAs to present the SATABeast LUNs as SCSI devices to Linux. As far as configuring FC zones within an IB fabric to make the LUNs visible to the HBAs, I'll leave that to you, as I've never done that either. Zero IB experience here, only FC. ;) I'm making a somewhat educated guess that a fully configured SATABeast with dual controllers and 42x2TB disks should be attainable for around $50K USD today. If 1.2GB/s sustained is enough performance, from a cost and rack footprint perspective, the 8Gbit SATABeast with the NXS-B60E 60 drive expansion box is really hard to beat--204TB in only 8U, in the ballpark of $80K USD. If my math is correct, that's around $400 USD per terabyte. I'm guessing 1TB of similar performance EMC storage is probably at least 4 times that. Disclaimer: I don't work for Nexsan, Qlogic, nor any reseller. I'm simply a satisfied customer of both. -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
