On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
Seconded. Also you can chain a couple of MD1000s at the back of the MD3000 to get even more storage over SAS. We have a number of those with the upstream OS installed but usually a single MD3000 is enough for what we use them for (mainly Oracle DB server or VMWare hosts). We tend to split the storage between two nodes and then do OCFS2.
For the cost/performance they're not too bad a unit. We grow by about 45TB per year of Medical Imaging Data. For each 15TB we buy a new head node, we're up to three now, so performance to our cluster just gets better as we go. These are all NFS/CIFS servers on a Jumbo Frame ethernet network. I originally had difficulty with the MD3000 talking multipath to the units and the only way I could get it to work reliably in an active/active configuration was to use the provided mptsas driver which was a cinch to install.
This was not the case with the Solaris hosts as they didn't talk RAID and ZFS with Solaris Multi-Pathing had built in support for the devices.