Hi all, While not a typical beowulf, I thought the list would have some input for this "storage cluster" or whatever we should call it :)
I'm looking at getting some big storage. Of all the parameters, getting as low dollars/(month*GB) is by far the most important. The price of acquiring and maintaining the storage solution is the number one concern. The setup will probably have a number of "head nodes" which receive a large amount of data over standard gigabit from a large amount of remote sources. Data is read infrequently from the head nodes by remote systems. The primary load on the system will be data writes. The head nodes need not see the same unified storage; so I am not required to have one big shared filesystem. If beneficial, each of the head nodes could have their own local storage. The storage pool will start out at around 100TiB and will grow to ~1PiB within a year or two (too early to tell). It would be nice to use as few racks as possible, and as little power as possible :) It *might* be possible to offload older files to tape; does anyone have experience with HSM on Linux? Does it work? Could it be worthwhile to investigate? One setup I was looking at, is simply using SunFire X4500 systems (you can put 48 standard 3.5" SATA drives in each 4U system). Assuming I can buy them with 1T SATA drives shortly, I could start out with 3 systems (12U) and grow the entire setup to 1P with 22 systems in little over two full racks. Any better ideas? Is there a way to get this more dense without paying an arm and a leg? Has anyone tried something like this with HSM? Thanks all, your input will be greatly appreciated! :) -- / jakob _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
