On 4/19/07, Adam Lindsay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
16x hot swap SATAII hard drives (plus an internal boot drive)
Tyan S2895 (K8WE) motherboard
Dual GigE (integral nVidia ports)
2x Areca 8-port PCIe (8-lane) RAID drivers
2x AMD Opteron 275 CPUs (2.2GHz, dual core)
8 GiB RAM
The supplier is used to shipping Linux servers in this 3U chassis, but
hasn't dealt with Solaris. He originally suggested 2GiB RAM, but I hear
things about ZFS getting RAM hungry after a while. I dug up the RAID
controllers after a quick look on Sun's HCL, but they're pricy for
something that's just going to give JBOD access (but the bus
interconnect looks to be quick, on the other hand).
I guess my questions are:
- Does anyone out there have a clue where the potential bottlenecks
might be?
Get INTEL GigE!!!!!!! NVidia aren't as fast and Intel drivers are very good.
If it is just storage then it might not matter whether you use Opterons or
Xeons. Since you are just feeding stuff from the disk to the nic, things
like HyperTransport are probably not so much of a win.
Not sure if Tyan have Intel 3U systems, maybe look at Supermicro instead.
- Is there anywhere where I can save a bit of money? (For example,
might the SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 hanging off the PCI-X slots
provide enough bandwidth to the disks?)
I'm using this card, seems to work fine. I posted some numbers on this at
[1].
This is a [2] 2U 12 disk system with two Dual Core 2GHz Xeons, 4Gb.
2x2x500Gb mirror and 5xRaid2z with Seagate ES 500Gb drives. Rellings reply
might be useful as well.
Raid cards a definitely a waste of money if you are using zfs.
- If I focused on simple streaming IO, would giving the server less RAM
have an impact on performance?
I imagine in a streaming situation with multiple clients more memory is
good. Is Solaris can do multiple pre-fetchs into memory for each stream and
client then you should get a big boost. Maybe that is tunable.
Short random read/writes is less likely to win from that situation.
- I had assumed four cores would be better than the two faster (3.0GHz)
single-core processors the vendor originally suggested. Agree?
Depends on workload probably. How many streams, etc.
[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=109779#109779
[2] http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=4014&step=4 - this is
just a http://supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/826/SC826TQ-R800LPV.cfmwith
the X7DBE m/b.
Nicholas
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