On 07/22/2011 12:33 AM, Mark Hahn wrote: >> Either way, I think if someone were to foolishly just toss together >>> 100TB of data into a box they would have a hell of a time getting >> anywhere near even 10% of the theoretical max performance-wise. > > storage isn't about performance any more. ok, hyperbole, a little. > but even a cheap disk does> 100 MB/s, and in all honesty, there are > not tons of people looking for bandwidth more than a small multiplier > of that. sure, a QDR fileserver wants more than a couple disks,
With all due respect, I beg to differ. The bigger you make your storage, the larger the pipes in you need, and the larger the pipes to the storage you need, lest you decide that tape is really cheaper after all. Tape does 100MB/s these days. And the media is relatively cheap (compared to some HD). If you don't care about access performance under load, you really can't beat its economics. More to the point, you need a really balanced architecture in terms of bandwidth. I think USB3 could be very interesting for small arrays, and pretty much expect to start seeing some as block targets pretty soon. I don't see enough aggregated USB3 ports together in a single machine to make this terribly interesting as a large scale storage medium, but it is a possible route. They are interesting boxen. We often ask customers if they'd consider non-enterprise drives. Failure rates similar to the enterprise as it turns out, modulo some ridiculous drive products. Most say no. Those who say yes don't see enhanced failure rates. > and if you're an iops-head, you're going flash anyway. This is more recent than you might have guessed ... at least outside of academia. We should have a fun machine to talk about next week, and show some benchies on. -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics, Inc. email: [email protected] web : http://scalableinformatics.com http://scalableinformatics.com/sicluster phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121 fax : +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
