| gabriel rosenkoetter on Mon, 13 Jan 2003 20:30:33 -0500 |
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On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 04:15:31PM -0500, Chris Hedemark wrote: > Having recently visited Gabe at work, Speaking of which, anyone get back to you yet? (Reply privately, I s'pose...) > The kind of stuff Gabe is working with is > pretty high end and sexy (and needs to be). Well, in all fairness, the FCAL arrays we've got are mid-range at best. They're Just a Bunch of Disks, really. The truly sexy stuff, that you get from Hitachi or EMC, does *way* more in "hard"ware (firmware, or even software, really; the EMC Symmetrics array has its own fairly large OS development team, for instance... they're not developing the interface for OSes to use, but the OS that runs on the array itself), making full mirrors of RAID 5 arrays synchronized at all times (at no performance loss), which you can then split off from the set, then backup to tape from that. Or, if you're *really* spendy, you've got a full set (or two) locally, and another full set on the other end of some dark fiber (which you either run fiber channel or a regular networking protocol down) and do off-site vaulting, all the rage if you're a data warehouser. All of this is orders of magnitude more expensive than what I deal with at work, already orders of magnitude more expensive than anything I'd keep (or want to pay the power bill for, incidentally) at home. > I can really see using big IDE disks on servers for a small business. > But software RAID is where I draw the line. Software RAID is a kluge, > and much more difficult to recover from in case of an actual failure > than any decent hardware array. Not to mention the drastic reduction > in overall performance (which might not be noticed on a small 200GB > file server for a local law firm, but would surely be noticed on an > array of a few dozen TB being hit by very I/O intensive relentless > jobs). Points I couldn't quite put clearly. But the real thing to do is find what seems to be right for your environment, and then test it. It doesn't matter if you've got 30000 users, if none of them are doing length, sequential writes, the speed of your RAID mechanism (software or hardware) isn't going to make much difference. > Chris Hedemark .. Prospect Park, PA .. http://yonderway.com ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Welcome for real! :^> -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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