CPU & RAM in a storage box

[Etzion Bar-Noy]

Linux LVM2 has been around for several years now. It can take and use
snapshots, and I do it for the last three or so years on *production*
 sites.
There are limitations, such as space utilization and performance, but the
most significant one is that LVM snapshots are nowhere near NetApp
snapshots. Check BTRFS or ZFS for such behavior.

Ez

2010/9/10 Erez D <erez0001 at gmail.com>

> 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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