[Beowulf] File server dual opteron suggestions?

[Michael Will]

What is your anticipated access pattern for the drives? Do you see
large files with streaming read/write or do you see lots of distributed
small read/writes? The first would be best cost/performance with 
SATA 7.2k-rpm where the latter is better to be 15k-rpm SCSI. 

SAS is going to be interesting soon and replace the 15-rpm SCSI drives
but it's too early for that today.

What amount of storage do you need? 
1TB? 40TB?

How do you plan to access it?

If you have a compute cluster with 128 compute nodes all wanting to
read/write to the
same shared filesystem, then you will have to look at (expensive in cost
and complexity)
cluster filesystems or you buy a high-performance NFS server that can
keep up with that
many clients.

Michael
 
-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
On Behalf Of David Mathog
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 9:49 AM
To: scheinin at crs4.it
Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] File server dual opteron suggestions?

Alan Scheinine wrote
> David Mathog wrote:

>   > 4 x 74 Gb disks Ultra320 (or make an argument for a particular 
> SATA)
> 
> Have you considered SAS?

Only to the extent that I priced a few disks and then ran in the other
direction.  They may be somewhat faster than ultra320 when pushing
random access writes to the limit but they cost significantly more and
there are not a lot of them out there.

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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