On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Richard Connamacher wrote:
I'm looking at building a high bandwidth file server to store video
for editing, as an alternative to buying a $30,000 hardware RAID and
spending $2000 per seat on fibrechannel and specialized SAN drive
software.
Uncompressed HD runs around 1.2 to 4 gigabits per second, putting it
in 10 gigabit Ethernet or FibreChannel territory. Any file server
would have to be able to move that many bits in sustained read and
sustained write, and doing both simultaneously would be a plus.
Please see a white paper I wrote entitled "ZFS and Digital
Intermediate" at
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/zfs-discuss/zfs-and-di.pdf
which expounds on this topic and makes it sound like zfs is the
perfect answer for this.
Unfortunately, I have since learned that zfs file prefetch ramps up
too slowly or becomes disabled for certain workloads. I reported a
bug. Many here are eagerly awaiting the next OpenSolaris development
release which is supposed to have fixes for the prefetch problem I
encountered.
I am told that a Solaris 10 IDR (customer-specific patch) will be
provided to me within the next few days to resolve the performance
issue.
There is another performance issue in which writes to the server cause
reads to briefly stop periodically. This means that the server could
not be used simultaneously for video playback while files are being
updated. To date there is no proposed solution for this problem.
Linux XFS seems like the top contender for video playback and editing.
From a description of XFS design and behavior, it would not surprise
me if it stuttered during playback when files are updated as well.
Linux XFS also buffers written data and writes it out in large batches
at a time.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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