jp...@cam.ac.uk said: > I can't speak for this particular situation or solution, but I think in > principle you are wrong. Networks are fast. Hard drives are slow. Put a > 10G connection between your storage and your front ends and you'll have the > bandwidth[1]. Actually if you really were hitting 1000x8Mbits I'd put 2, > but that is just a question of scale. In a different situation I have boxes > which peak at around 7 Gb/s down a 10G link (in reality I don't need that > much because it is all about the IOPS for me). That is with just twelve 15k > disks. Your situation appears to be pretty ideal for storage hardware, so > perfectly achievable from an appliance.
Depending on usage, I disagree with your bandwidth and latency figures above. An X4540, or an X4170 with J4000 JBOD's, has more bandwidth to its disks than 10Gbit ethernet. You would need three 10GbE interfaces between your CPU and the storage appliance to equal the bandwidth of a single 8-port 3Gb/s SAS HBA (five of them for 6Gb/s SAS). It's also the case that the Unified Storage platform doesn't have enough bandwidth to drive more than four 10GbE ports at their full speed: http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2009/09/22/7410-hardware-update-and-analyzing-t he-hypertransport/ We have a customer (internal to the university here) that does high throughput gene sequencing. They like a server which can hold the large amounts of data, do a first pass analysis on it, and then serve it up over the network to a compute cluster for further computation. Oracle has nothing in their product line (anymore) to meet that need. They ended up ordering an 8U chassis w/40x 2TB drives in it, and are willing to pay the $2k/yr retail ransom to Oracle to run Solaris (ZFS) on it, at least for the first year. Maybe OpenIndiana next year, we'll see. Bye Oracle.... Regards, Marion _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
