[CentOS] 8-15 TB storage: any recommendations?

[Christopher Chan]

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...