David Gagne
Forum Replies Created
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https://www.small-tree.com/TitaniumZ_16_p/tz-16.htm
Up to 64TB, 2x 10Gb ports standard, up to 18x 10Gb ports available. 32GB memory.
I’d say it’s a direct competitor of yours?
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How does this compare with others, like, say, Small-Tree?
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Re: RAID10. Please fire your “system builders” who think that raid10 is good for media applications.
Re: Infiniband. It’s not unreliable, it’s just complicated (especially when working with clusters like Isilon), and when you’re dealing with complicated solutions, you want dedicated (trained and paid) support people standing behind it.
Re: Link Aggregation. Link aggregation works like this as far as I understand: 2x 1gb allows 2Gb total, but only 1Gb per socket at a time. What this means is that one file transfer or stream can only go at 1Gb, but 2 of them or more can saturate 2Gb. So it would depend on your application whether or not it helps you. Read this: https://blog.open-e.com/bonding-versus-mpio-explained/
Here’s what good responsible “system builders” do – they detail out their exact requirements (bandwidth per client, number of clients, amount of storage, software connectivity requirements, reliability requirements, and then they shop for RETAIL solutions that meet these needs.
Build-it-yourself stuff almost never works reliably in production environments, unless it’s something super simple and your requirements are super low. You will cost your company money through down-time, lack of performance, or even lost projects.
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Gavin, give me a second to channel Zelin here for you:
You’re doing it wrong. You are massively overlooking a bunch of hidden costs. Let me spell it out for you…
The hardware parts are a small portion of what actual costs are for a production storage system.
You mentioned Infiniband. You know who uses that? Isilon. Do you know what they charge? Well, let me put it this way. To renew basic level support on my 20TB cluster, the cost was nearly $15k. That $15k is JUST FOR SUPPORT. Do you really need support on a system like that? YES YOU DO. Why? Well, if you have an NVRAM battery go bad (I had 3), or a motherboard failure (I had 1), YOU NEED SUPPORT.
You mentioned Raid10. To me, that is a sign that you don’t know what you’re doing at all. Almost all media raids are Raid5 or Raid6.
You mentioned “quad bonded ethernet to each client” — again, you do not know what you’re doing. You can’t bond clients for more bandwidth like that (at least not for single transfers), but you CAN bond the server for more total connections.
You mentioned 8TB of storage, but what about bandwidth needs? I don’t think that 8 disks (in RAID10?) will provide you with the bandwidth you need.
If you only want to spend, say, $3k, forget shared storage. Just buy everyone a small thunderbolt or usb3 RAID.
If you want shared storage, you’re going to have to spend at least $15k if not 30-40k.
As Zelin would say, “You don’t know what you’re doing, call someone who does.”
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For a non SSD SATA2 is completely fine, as you won’t touch the performance of SATA3.
SATA2 theoretical max: 375MB/s (although a drive will only do 200)
SATA3 is double that (drive still only does 200)
USB3 is 5Gb/s (625MB/s).A couple of reasons why you would go 6Gb SATA3 — compatibility. Some newer drives do 6Gb by default and you have to jumper them to switch them to 3Gb otherwise they won’t work with SATA2. Also the latest models are all SATA3, while older ones are SATA2… do you want an old SATA drive? Probably not…
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For best performance, get a SAS card like this:
https://www.promax.com/p-781-atto-expresssas-r380-sas-raid-card.aspxAnd hookup some storage like this:
https://www.promax.com/s-67-fastmaxfx8.aspxShould see 700-900MB/s…
For more speed get a bigger box like this:
https://www.promax.com/s-69-fastmax-fx16.aspx
~1000MB/s -
Ew. Just when I thought that AFP was the go to protocol. And that article is over a year old.
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In terms of hardware, I don’t really care for the iMac-esque HP model. If indeed the Mac Pro is dead, I’d look at custom built workstations from Acme Micro based on Super Micro boards.
Great gear at near-shelf pricing, no assembly required.
Build it as beefy as you need it.
I configured a Dual Xeon E5 system with 64GB ram and it’s only about $4K.
https://www.acmemicro.com/ShowProduct.aspx?pid=10414
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*EDIT* Meant to reply to Bob’s post on OWC instead of this one! */EDIT*
I thought it was intriguing as well. Mini-SAS SAN? 48Gbs? Wow. I am still curious how it will implement in the real world, at their booth I think it was running MetaSAN or SanMP. I asked if it could run XSAN and they said “Maybe, we got that working in the lab with some hacks.”
The link for those interested:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/storage/Enterprise/jupiter/mini-SASSimilarly interesting was ExaSan’s PCIE SAN, at speeds up to 20Gbs. Again I’m not sure how it will work in the real world, and both I think currently suffer from short cable lengths, but that will all change with PCIE 3.0 soon.
I think the industry is saying that Thunderbolt is not fast enough 😉
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Bummer.