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

Wed Jan 6 22:50:29 UTC 2010
James A. Peltier <jpeltier at fas.sfu.ca>

On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Joseph L. Casale wrote:

> While I have built many, I can tell you that buying a turnkey solution
> is *always* worth it if its mission critical. When you piece something
> together, you are always in for potential surprises and other caveats.
>
> Like the rest have stated, I can only say that you haven't mentioned
> how busy it will be. That might dictate which type of sata drives or
> sas for example.
>
> Whatever you do, get a good controller with nvram. I have a lot of LSI
> and while they are rock solid, the gui is a piece of sh!t and full of bugs.
> I always use the cli unless not possible.
>
> Frankly, I always hated Adaptec, but I have seen mention of them making some
> sas controllers that performed better that lsi? Take that w/ a grain of salt,
> but next controller I buy, I am shopping around...

We use Dell 2950s with an MD3000 or MD1000 depending on OS.  For our 
Solaris NAS node we use the MD1000 for CentOS we use the MD3000 because of 
the hardware RAID controller.  Gives us 15TB of RAW disk space with 1TB 
drives plus room for 4-5 additional drives (based on configuration) in the 
chassis.

-- 
James A. Peltier
Systems Analyst (FASNet), VIVARIUM Technical Director
HPC Coordinator
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
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E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
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