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From: Wayne E Baisley <baisley@alumni.rice.edu>
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Subject: Re: storage bits
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Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 23:20:31 -0500

At Fermi (yes I'm back there; long story), we're buying 4U systems like 
the fiscal year is ending.  We have ~20 ASA IR4US1 systems (not pushing 
them, there are some other similar units available), with 60 more on 
order.  They're 2-1/2 TB for $10K, although we add a separate IDE or 
SCSI system disk, because the 3Ware RAID controllers can saturate. 
Intel SDS2 motherboard, 2 1.4GHz P3s, 2 GB ram, 2 3Ware 7850 Raid 
controllers, 16 160GB Maxtors, SysKonnect gigabit enet, Fermi RedHat 7.3.

http://www.asacomputers.com/cgi-bin/index.fcg?action=displayscreen&templateid=25

There's some interesting info at:

http://mit.fnal.gov/~msn/cdf/caf/server_evaluation.html

We've decided to go with XFS (which Linus has just merged into the 2.5 
tree), mostly because none of the other journaled fs's can maintain >30 
GB/s rates with a nearly full filesystem (mostly GB files) with random 
deletions (we use these systems for caching our 2 petabyte tape store). 
  Ext3 almost did it but dropped from from ~38MB/s to 10 with random 
deletions, and didn't want to do direct io at all.  Only concern is an 
occasional system lock-up we haven't chased down yet.  A load avg > 100 
is always a patio of fun.

Oddly, even fairly beefy systems like these will breathe hard to keep up 
with the new STK 9940B tape drives, which crank along at a steady 
30GB/s.  And you oldforktimers will remember "doofus" my old file server 
system.  It would only take 2.1" of rackspace now, instead of 14 racks.

Cheers,
Wayne


