[Bioclusters] Urgent advice on RAID design requested

Angulo, David dangulo at cti.depaul.edu
Tue Jan 16 19:22:06 EST 2007


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
> 
> 
> 
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