GBLabs Space

[John Heagy]

Space expansion was explained to me like this:

Imagine chassises can be expanded horizontally and vertically.

Adding chassises horizontally increases speed/size and can add redundancy. Stacking vertically adds capacity.

If you start with a Space chassis with three raid cards in it you ca add two addition Space EX chassises horizontally. This gives you speed and or course size. If you use three Space chassises then one entire chassis can fail so you have speed and redundancy.

Once you’ve decided on your horizontal config you can add additional rows vertically to add capacity.

Data wil write to the first row only until either the bandwidth or size of that first row is exceeded.
No need to match drive size when adding rows. Just number of chassises and number of drives in each. In other words you can add a row of 4TB Space to existing 2 or 3TB Space.

The horizontal expansion is via SAS and the vertical is via 10G. All rows are connected to a NAS cluster controller which is basically a box full of 10Gig cards. One can have two of these controllers for redundancy as well.

Hope I got that all correct.

John