On 7/23/2012 11:05 AM, Shaffin Bhanji wrote: > I am thinking of the Norco 16/20 hotswap and a 2x operton QC CPU m/b > but wasnt sure what a solid performing m/b would be that will work > well with the LSI? Any thoughts?
You didn't even mention the drives. The drives are the most important ingredient of an IO server. If you want low latency high throughput random IO, you want 10k or 15k drives (or SSD), and you can use fewer of them WRT 7.2k SATA drives. No matter what you do, do NOT use parity RAID, i.e. RAID5/6, for your workload. You will horribly regret it and curse your new machine. It won't be the hardware's fault, but yours, for choosing the wrong RAID level, and then not configuring your storage stack properly to work with it. Even it if configure everything properly for RAID5/6, the performance will still be an order of magnitude lower than RAID10, for a random IOPS workload. If this machine will strictly be an IO server, not running any VMs or other applications locally, then you're wasting your money with a dual socket 8 core system. IO servers don't need lots of CPU cycles and typically don't need lots of RAM. What they do need is fast disks and a good RAID controller. If dual core AMD server processors were still available I'd still be using them in storage servers. The extra two cores go wasted 99% of the time in such a machine. Even the 2nd core in a dual core chip goes wasted most of the time. The only time it comes in handy is processing NIC/HBA interrupts under very heavy IO load. Installing irqbalance is a necessity with such an IO server. > Thanks my hands are now itching for this project to be completed :-) As I said, the SuperMicro box with 8x 10K drives in RAID10 and the LSI will run circles around a 16/20 bay box with 7.2k drives in RAID6, with a random IO workload. This assumes a production environment with a real workload. If this is a home/hobby server, you may not notice the difference as you'll never sufficiently tax the IO subsystem. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/500e0366.4080...@hardwarefreak.com
