[CentOS] RE: Largish filesystems [was Re: XFS install issue]

Mon Jun 2 17:29:08 UTC 2008
mslist at opcenter.net <mslist at opcenter.net>

To start I wish to that you for the swift response on this 
issue. I do not think that I would get such a quick 
response from a proprietary (closed-source) company. Open 
Source :-).

To respond to one the comments about large file systems
“recommend you split it in several smaller (2-4TB) 
filesystems “
This is not feasible in many situations. In some 
situations 2-4TB is not even a reasonable starting point.

A little background.
I have been using RH from v2 to v9. and in v9 I did get an 
install ISO of RH9 that included XFS support. Way back 
then I used it on a 1.4TB PATA hardware raid 5 (A lot of 
disk for it time). The system is still operational with 
out any FS issues short of failed drives. Fixed with the 
hot spares on the system. in five years of operation the 
system has had one outage a maintenance reboot Less then 
2min down). After RH9 I switched to Centos.

The system that I am currently configuring with 7+ TB of 
storage is one of the smaller storage servers for our 
systems. Using the same configuration with more drives we 
are planning several 20TB+ systems.

For the work we do a single file system over 100TB is not 
unreasonable. We will be replacing a 80TB SAN system based 
on StorNext with a Isilon system with 10G network 
connections.

If there was a way to create a Linux (Centos) 100TB – 
500TB or larger clustered file system with the nodes 
connected via infiniband that was easily manageable with 
throughput that can support multiple 10Gbps Ethernet 
connections I would be very interested.

And once more thanks for the fast response.

Mike