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

Thu Jan 7 21:45:32 UTC 2010
Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com>

On 1/6/2010 2:35 PM, Boris Epstein wrote:
>
> we are trying to set
> up some storage servers to run under Linux

You should also consider FreeBSD 8.0, which has the newest version of 
ZFS up and running stably on it.  I use Linux for most server tasks, but 
for big storage, Linux just doesn't have anything like this yet.

Yeah, yeah, btrfs someday, I know.  But today, ZFS is where it's at. 
It's the easiest way of managing large pools of storage I know of short 
of a Drobo, and Drobos have big problems of their own.

I'm not recommending OpenSolaris on purpose.  For the last few years, it 
was the only stable production-quality implementation of ZFS, but with 
FreeBSD 8.0, it just lost that advantage.  I think, as a Linux fan, you 
will be happier with FreeBSD than OpenSolaris.

> storage volume would be in the range specified: 8-15 TB.

That puts you right on the edge of workability with 32-bit hardware. 
ext3's limit on 32-bit is 8 TB, and you can push it to 16 TB by 
switching to XFS or JFS.  Best to use 64-bit hardware if you can.