Also if you are a startup, there are some ridiculously sweet deals on Sun hardware through the Sun Startup Essentials program. http://sun.com/startups
This way you do not need to worry about compatibility and you get all the Enterprise RAS features at a pretty low price point. -Angelo On Nov 17, 2009, at 4:14 PM, Bruno Sousa wrote: > Hi, > > I currently have a 1U server (Sun X2200) with 2 LSI HBA attached to a > Supermicro JBOD chassis each one with 24 disks , SATA 1TB, and so far so > good.. > So i have a 48 TB raw capacity, with a mirror configuration for NFS > usage (Xen VMs) and i feel that for the price i paid i have a very nice > system. > > > Bruno > > Ian Allison wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I know (from the zfs-discuss archives and other places [1,2,3,4]) that >> a lot of people are looking to use zfs as a storage server in the >> 10-100TB range. >> >> I'm in the same boat, but I've found that hardware choice is the >> biggest issue. I'm struggling to find something which will work nicely >> under solaris and which meets my expectations in terms of hardware. >> Because of the compatibility issues, I though I should ask here to see >> what solutions people have already found. >> >> >> I'm learning as I go here, but as far as I've been able to determine, >> the basic choices for attaching drives seem to be >> >> 1) SATA Port multipliers >> 2) SAS Multilane Enclosures >> 3) SAS Expanders >> >> In option 1, the controller can only talk to one device at a time, in >> option 2 each miniSAS connector can talk to 4 drives at a time but in >> option 3 the expander can allow for communication with up to 128 >> drives. I'm thinking about having ~8-16 drives on each controller >> (PCI-e card) so I think I want option 3. Additionally, because I might >> get greedier in the future and decide to add more drives on each >> controller I think option 3 is the best way to go. I can have a >> motherboard with a lot of PCIe slots and have one controller card for >> each expander. >> >> >> Cases like the Supermicro 846E1-R900B have 24 hot swap bays accessible >> via a single (4u) LSI SASX36 SAS expander chip, but I'm worried about >> controller death and having the backplane as a single point of failure. >> >> I guess, ideally, I'd like a 4u enclosure with 2x2u SAS expanders. If >> I wanted hardware redundancy, I could then use mirrored vdevs with one >> side of each mirror on one controller/expander pair and the other >> side on a separate pair. This would allow me to survive controller or >> expander death as well hard drive failure. >> >> >> Replace motherboard: ~500 >> Replace backplane: ~500 >> Replace controller: ~300 >> Replace disk (SATA): ~100 >> >> >> Does anyone have any example systems they have built or any thoughts >> on what I could do differently? >> >> Best regards, >> Ian. >> >> >> [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg27234.html >> [2] http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17543496 >> [3] http://www.stringliterals.com/?p=53 >> [4] http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg22761.html >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> zfs-discuss mailing list >> zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org >> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >> > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
