[Beowulf] GPFS on Linux (x86)

[Buccaneer for Hire.]

--- Mark Hahn <hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> (personally, I don't often have SATA disks in raid
> which are actually busy all the time.  but we're an 
> academic HPC site, so don't have anything like 24x7 
> DB activity, or CERN-like streams of data...)

We do. We have lots of nodea and losts of storage-and
a nice mix. We beat the snot out of our storage 24/7. 
A lot of is ATA. And even my buddy there who is in the
global storage team like to look down his nose at it
as he talks about his FC disks, and I have found that
(1) I get great performance out of our storage-better
than they do since it is tuned for performance; and
(2) the failures are no-where near what I was lead to
believe they would be.

> but it's worthwhile to note that SCSI disks are
> still dramatically more expensive than SATA.  yes, 
> there are reasons, but even so, price/performance is

> a pretty strong argument...

Well, yeah!  I don't see SCSI as anything to purchase
nowadays.  If you have to use something other than ATA
might as well get FC.

> well, for what it's worth, my organization bought
> something like 6k
> SATA disks over the past year, and have seen pretty
> sparse failures.
> (unfortunately, our book-keeping is probably not
> good enough...)

I have a CX700 full of ATA (except for the first tray
of course) and after almost two year of beating the
snot out of it we have had 2 disk failures over a year
apart.  In 4 hours the spare comes in and that's that.


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