Or just "try and buy" the machines from Sun for ZERO DOLLARS!!!
Like Erik said......
"Both the Thor and 7110 are available for Try-and-Buy. Get them and test them against your workload - it's the only way to be sure (to paraphrase Ripley)."
Marc Bevand wrote:
Richard Connamacher <rich <at> indieimage.com> writes:
I was thinking of custom building a server, which I think I can do for
around $10,000 of hardware (using 45 SATA drives and a custom enclosure),
and putting OpenSolaris on it. It's a bit of a risk compared to buying a
$30,000 server, but would be a fun experiment.
Do you have a $2k budget to perform a cheap experiment?
Because for this amount of money you can build the following server that has
10TB of usable storage capacity, and that would be roughly able to sustain
sequential reads between 500MByte/s and 1000MByte/s over NFS over a Myricom
10GbE NIC. This is my estimation. I am less sure about sequential writes:
I think this server would be capable of at least 250-500 MByte/s.
$150 - Mobo with onboard 4-port AHCI SATA controller (eg. any AMD 700
chipset), and at least two x8 electrical PCI-E slots
$200 - Quad-core Phenom II X4 CPU + 4GB RAM
$150 - LSISAS1068E 8-port SAS/SATA HBA, PCI-E x8
$500 - Myri-10G NIC (10G-PCIE-8B-C), PCI-E x8
$1000 - 12 x 1TB SATA drives (4 on onboard AHCI, 8 on LSISAS1068E)
- It is important to choose an AMD platform because the PCI-E lanes
will always come from the northbridge chipset which is connected
to the CPU via an HT 3.0 link. On Intel platforms, the DMI link
between the ICH and MCH will be a bottleneck if the mobo gives
you PCI-E lanes from the MCH (in my experience, this is the case
of most desktop mobos).
- Make sure you enable AHCI in the BIOS.
- Configure the 12 drives as striped raidz vdevs:
zpool create mytank raidz d0 d1 d2 d3 d4 d5 raidz d6 d7 d8 d9 d10 d11
- Buy drives able to sustain 120-130 MByte/s of sequential reads at the
beginning of the platter (my recommendation: Seagate 7200.12) this
way your 4Gbit/s requirement will be met even in the worst case when
reading from the end of the platters.
Thank me for saving you $28k :-) The above experiment would be a way
to validate some of your ideas before building a 45-drive server...
-mrb
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