[Beowulf] Large raid rebuild times

[james bardin]

Hi Joe,

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Joe Landman
<landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
>
>  We have customers with 32TB raw per RAID, and when a drive fails, it
> rebuilds.  Rebuild time is a function of how fast the card is set up to do
> rebuilds, you can tune the better cards in terms of "background" rebuild
> performance.  For low rebuild speeds, we have seen 24 hours+, for high
> rebuild speeds, we have seen 12-15 hours for the 32TB.
>

Thanks for that. That sounds inline with my expectations.
Any chance you've compared linux md raid6 to hardware solutions for
your devices?



>  ZFS is probably not what you want to do ... building a critical dependency
> upon a product that has a somewhat uncertain future ...
>

I'm not too worried about zfs - it has plenty of following. I'm
personally waiting for btrfs to stabilize so we can start testing, but
that's a ways off. The issue here is that the group setting up these
storage servers is an all linux shop, and they don't want the overhead
of another OS.



Thanks
-jim