[CentOS] What NAS device(s) do you use? And why?

Sat Dec 11 23:06:59 UTC 2010
Rafa Grimán <rafagriman at gmail.com>

On Saturday 11 December 2010 23:50 Jerry Franz wrote
> On 12/11/2010 09:24 AM, Rainer Duffner wrote:
> > With 100TB, DIY is out of the question ;-)
> 
> I wouldn't say that. It would be...challenging...but not out of the
> question.


I don't see why it's out of the question. Why should it be? Nowadays it's not 
that much volume: 50 x 2 TB drives (+ parity drives depending on the type of 
RAID you're going to use + some spares).

A mid size storage array scales 2 - 3 times that much: LSI OEMs (SGI, IBM, 
SUN/Oracle), Bull's Optima 1500/2000, DDN's S2A 6620, ... And that's a single 
array with dual controller (active/active) so you've got HA in the array. 

If you're going to set up an active/pasive pair of NAS heads, you don't even 
need the FC switches (those storage arrays have 4 - 12 FC ports so you can 
plug the servers right into the storage array controllers). You'd just need 2 
servers that could scale in memory and I/O ... which is very common: mid level 
servers have 2 sockets (8 - 24 cores) and scale to around 96 GB and have 6 x 
PCIe slots.

If you _DO_ need active/active NAS heads, then you can go with GPFS/GFS/CXFS 
filesystems and you'd need a couple of FC switches.

[...]

   Rafa

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