Jakob Oestergaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
Even at the price of reliability. > 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. They are nice, I understand. And seem like a good approach. The vendors will likely want to sell you SAN-ified systems with cluster file systems and lots of Windows-only management software. It can take some convincing to get them to understand that that is actually not what you are looking for. > 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? That is probably not worth the bother. But something that you have to be prepared for when going to that storage volume is that you *will* suffer data corruption at some point, and you need to plan for it. See for example http://cern.ch/Peter.Kelemen/talk/2007/kelemen-2007-C5-Silent_Corruptions.pdf It's quite possible (though unlikely) for a hard disk to suddenly return corrupted data without signalling a read error, and this is a possibility that raid controllers typically just ignores. And then you have the usual crop of software, firmware and hardware errors that can trash your data more or less silently. At a minimum, make sure you keep checksums of all files so you can verify their integrity. -- Leif Nixon - Systems expert ------------------------------------------------------------ National Supercomputer Centre - Linkoping University ------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
