You can find 1Tb disk drives for commodity machines on the web now for $500. David Sigfredo Angulo Faculty DePaul University School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems dangulo at cti.depaul.edu 312-362-5041 > -----Original Message----- > From: bioclusters-bounces+dangulo=cti.depaul.edu at bioinformatics.org > [mailto:bioclusters-bounces+dangulo=cti.depaul.edu at bioinformatics.org] On > Behalf Of martin goodson > Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 10:18 AM > To: bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > Subject: [Bioclusters] Urgent advice on RAID design requested > > > I'd like to ask for some advice on the design of a new storage system: > > We are looking to buy a basic SAN storage system with ~ 4 TB usable > capacity. Our total budget is £15,000 (~$25,000?). The filesystem is for > bioinformatics computational work including a fair amount of database > access > but also typical bioinformatics flat file access (>1Gb files). > > We would like good performance but really reliability is the number one > issue. The SAN would be in use day and night by a 60 node cluster so I > guess > we would be looking at enterprise level reliability if not 24/7 (is there > a > difference?). We plan to attach 4 servers to the SAN which all would be > linux intel/AMD. > > We have been using RAID5 SATA with an adaptec fs4500 box with really bad > experiences so we would really like to get this right. (We have had > problems > with the controller as well drives failing during RAID5 rebuild.) Good > hardware monitoring would be a must. The controller and basically the > whole > system must be really well supported, especially in Linux. Our sysadmin is > really overloaded and would prefer something that does not suck up all her > time in maintenance and configuration. > > Just to be perfectly clear, our priorities are reliability >>> size > > performance. > > We already have a quote from HP for a SCSI Modular Storage Array with SAN > Switch 2Gbit/8 port BASE SAN KIT. > Is this a reasonable setup. Does anyone have any experience with this kit > or > can suggest alternatives? > Is SCSI over-specifying? Are enterprise SATA drives / controllers /systems > now up to scratch? Should we be using RAID6 or RAID10? > > We would really really appreciate some help here. > > Thanks in advance, > > Martin Goodson > Functional Genetics Unit > Oxford University > > > > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters