[ale] Fault Tolerant High Read Rate System Configuration

Greg Clifton gccfof5 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 28 13:37:06 EDT 2009


Hi Jim,

You do mean PCIe these days, don't you? Being serial point to point data
xfer resolves the bus contention issue, no? Ain't much in the way of
multi-PCI bus mobos to be had any more as the migration to PCIe is in full
swing. I expect PCI will be SO 20th century by Q1 '10.

What about a single 12, 16, or 24 drive RAID controller from 3Ware or Areca
(PCIe x8 native, I believe for both now). I'm sure it is much greater than
PCI (even PCIX @ 133MHz ~ 800mb/s), but what is the bandwidth on PCIe
anyways?

You are basically talking RAID 10 type configuration, no? Using the entire
drive vs. short stroking so no complications in prepping a replacement
drive, good thought.

As Richard suggested, customer is interested in some sort of mirrored/load
balanced/failover setup with 2 systems (if it fits the budget). How to, is
where I am mostly clueless.

Thanks,
Greg

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 12:24 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> multi-pci bus (not just multi pci _slot_) mobo with several add-on
> SATA300 cards. Hang fast drives from each card matching the aggregate
> drive throughput to the bandwidth of the pci bus slot. Make pairs of
> drives on different cards be mirrors. Join all mirror pairs into a
> stripped array for speed.
>
> Use entire drive for each mirror slice so any failure is just a drive
> replacement. Add extra cooling for the drives.
>
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Greg Clifton<gccfof5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi Guys,
> >
> > I am working on a quote for a board of realtors customer who has ~ 6000
> > people hitting his database, presumably daily per the info I pasted
> below.
> > He wants fast reads and maximum up time, perhaps mirrored systems. So I
> > though I would pick you smart guys brains for any suggestions as to the
> most
> > reliable/economical means of achieving his goals. He is thinking in terms
> of
> > some sort of mirror of iSCSI SAN systems.
> >
> > Currently we are only using 50G of drive space, I do not see going above
> > 500G for many years to come. What we need to do is to maximize IO
> > throughput, primarily read access (95% read, 5% write). We have over
> 6,000
> > people continually accessing 1,132,829 Million (as of today) small (<1M)
> > files.
> >
> > Tkx,
> > Greg Clifton
> > Sr. Sales Engineer
> > CCSI.us
> > 770-491-1131 x 302
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> --
> James P. Kinney III
> Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
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