I just purchased an equallogic SAN with 16 1TB drives for 52k at work. Love it, scheduled snapshots, thin provisioning, iscsi only but fairly swift at 16 spindles in a RAID 50. Jason www.cyborgworkshop.org John R Pierce wrote: > Ed Morrison wrote: >> Hi: >> >> I need advice on implementing a storage server. I really do not have >> the $ to spend for a Dell iSCSI storage divice and I am thinking >> trunning CentOS 5.x with ftp or FreeNAS. Here is what I am looking at >> and concerned about. >> >> Situation: >> My current storage needs are approximately 1.5 TB annually. This will >> increase to about 3.5 TB annually over the next 5 years (rough est.). >> This box will just be a data archive and once it is full it will only >> be used very infrequently if not used at all. Files are small up to 10 >> MB but numerous. >> > > infrastructure to support lots of SATA drives isn't real cheap > regardless. you really don't want to just bolt a bunch of drives up > inside a jumbo desktop tower and call it a server. 5 years at that > run rate is going to be something like 12TB total storage, which using > commodity 500GB SATA drives in raid10 will take around 48 drives. > Thats a lot of SATA channels... > > With that many spindles, you'll also want to allocate several hot spares. > > I dislike raid5 for a number of reasons, and would recommend sticking > with mirroring, eg raid1 or raid10. You /never/ want to build a raid5 > much over about 6-8 disks, or the raid rebuild times get ridiculous and > double drive failures will lose huge amounts of storage. > > > hey, have you considered the Sun x4500 ? its a 4U(?) dual dualcore > opteron server that comes with 48 x 500GB SATA drives. *** > > >> CentOS: >> Upgrading to the newer CentOS flavors. I will not have the ability to >> archive this data to tape and I am concerned about loosing the data >> when upgrading the OS. How best to handle this? >> > as others have said, as long as your critical data is on seperate file > systems, there should be no issue here. > >> Storage limitation. It is my understanding that there is a 2 TB >> storage limitation with Linux (and windows) in general particularly >> for stability. I see that ReiserFS can go up to 16 TB. Is any one >> using this? If so, how has it been for you? >> > > since your data is archival in nature, it really shouldn't be that hard > to manage it as multiple 2 TB chunks on seperate file systems. when > you fill 2TB, take 8 x 500GB more SATA drives, raid10 them, and mount > them as another file system, /u01, /u02, .... keep an index file > somewhere which logs which backups are where. > > >> >> FreeNAS >> Anyone using FreeNAS? What is your experience? How easy is it to add >> new drives and keep your data? Upgrading to newer versions? > > I setup OpenFiler once, that worked quite nicely, supported NFS, SMB, > and iSCSI, and was pretty easy to use. I'd have to assume FreeNAS is > similar. > > > > *** heresy (for this list), Solaris 10, with its ZFS file system, is > extremely good at handling very large storage configurations like this. > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos