CPU & RAM in a storage box

[Erez D]

here is my 3 cents:

In two companies i worked for, i designed similiar servers.

1. i wanted to have as less as a down time, and i didn't want to buy another
server just to sit and wait for a failure, so i decided it should work on
any pc with any raid controller - i decided to do the raid in software, so
it will be hardware independant - in case of hardware failure - just get any
pc with any raid controller ( the disks may even be connected via usb if you
do not have a raid controller) and everything is up in minutes.

2. I wanted to have snapshots like in a net-app - making snapshots every
hour or so. using the most up to date redhat distributions of that time -
when creating a snapshot, once in a while the server got locked (dead).
i tried it again when LVM2 was officially released, and got similiar
results. so as they say "once bitten, twice shy" - I will take a lot of
proof LVM is stable enough for snapshots, before i try it again.

3. linux caches the disk data before it writes it to disk. this is very good
for performance, but may create a big data loss in case of power failure...


cheers,
erez.

2010/9/9 Hetz Ben Hamo <hetzbh at gmail.com>

> Hi people,
> I'm planning to add some big storage solution to my VPS business<http://hetz.biz>.
> I did some checking and calculated the costs, and figured out that if I want
> to have a decent 12TB solution NAS box, it would be best if I would roll my
> own. (12 TB before all the RAID stuff, after that it would lot less). All
> other solutions are very expensive (example: IBM EXP 3000 costs here 6K nis
> without a single hard disk).
>
> I'm planning to use hardware based RAID card, minimal Linux distribution
> and have some offers like iSCSI, NFS, CIFS - the usual suspects.
>
> My question is: since I'll use hardware RAID card, which processor and how
> much RAM should I put in such a machine? Xeon is overkill IIRC.
>
> What do you suggest?
>
> Thanks and Shana Tova
> Hetz
>
> --
> my blog (hebrew): http://benhamo.org
> Skype: heunique
> MSN: hetz-blog at benhamo.org
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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