Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 01/08/2010 12:53 AM, John R Pierce wrote:
Christopher Chan wrote:
Yes, the Sun Fire X4540 uses software raid but not necessarily zfs...if you install another operating system that is not Solaris or OpenSolaris, it won't be zfs.
the thing to note on the Thumper (X4540), each of those 48 SATA drives has its own channel to the system bus. I believe it uses 6 8-port SATA controllers, each attached to the Opteron's Hypertransport via PCI-Express x4. this means you can hit some really high aggregate IO speeds...
have you actually tried it ?
cause when I did - the x45xx's/zfs were between 18 to 20% slower on disk i/o alone compared with a supermicro box with dual areca 1220/xfs.
I'd imagine that a x4540 setup as md nested raid1+0 should give the dual Areca a run for its money (okay...not quite in real money terms but you get the idea) and I wonder what zfs would be like on a dual Areca 1220 box.
the thumpers make for decent backup or vtl type roles, not so much for online high density storage.
I wonder how much that would change with a bbu NVRAM card for an external journal for ext4 and the disks on md. Unless one cannot add a bbu NVRAM card...