Like anything else, the sizing you are looking at for HDs can affect performance depending on what your application and read/write requirements/habits are. Its inaccurate to state "performance problems" as a global issue as "performance" means different things to different customers.
Consult with your salesperson and thier SE..they will be glad to help you make the best decision to match your specific environment, or follow this thread..im sure we'll get into a healthy debate on this. *grin*
Cheers!
On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Mohler, Jeff wrote:
Like anything else, the sizing you are looking at for HDs can affect performance depending on what your application and read/write requirements/habits are. Its inaccurate to state "performance problems" as a global issue as "performance" means different things to different customers.
Sometimes I wish there was a 30-drive, 4U tall back-to-back disk shelf of 15000 rpm 18GB drives I could attach to a Netapp. Other times I just want massive storage and don't care that much about performance. The new 72GB drives seem to fit the bill. :) I have a couple of shelves on order to hold things like gigantic RADIUS accounting logs that are written once to disk, read back weekly or monthly for reporting, and generally not needed until we need to track down abuse cases. I figure we should get about 330GB of usable space per shelf. They will certainly be fast enough for our application.
2001-01-08-02:46:59 Brian Tao:
Sometimes I wish there was a 30-drive, 4U tall back-to-back disk shelf of 15000 rpm 18GB drives I could attach to a Netapp.
The need...for speed!
Other times I just want massive storage and don't care that much about performance.
But, presumably, you still care about amazing reliability, effortless manageability, snapshots, or some other unique attribute of the NetApp; unless one or more of 'em are important, it seems to me like the way to go would be to get handful of cheap PC chassis', a short stack of cheap EIDE RAID controllers, and a large pile of the $250/each 80GB EIDE drives.
-Bennett
On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Bennett Todd wrote:
But, presumably, you still care about amazing reliability, effortless manageability, snapshots, or some other unique attribute of the NetApp;
Precisely... we still need the reliability, the near-zero maintenance, the ability to centralize our backups, the capability for sharing out the data to both NFS and CIFS clients, the ability to arbitrarily create "filesystems" and instantly resize them up or down, etc. OTOH, we don't need 15000 ops/sec to write out log files. 72GB drives are great for this situation.
unless one or more of 'em are important, it seems to me like the way to go would be to get handful of cheap PC chassis', a short stack of cheap EIDE RAID controllers, and a large pile of the $250/each 80GB EIDE drives.
We have two applications that don't make economic sense for us to put on Netapps: our backup staging servers and our news servers. Both of those use 50GB and 72GB SCSI JBOD... probably about US$15K per terabyte, but still very fast and very reliable. I'd rather not have any IDE drives in my servers if I can help it (and Sun is foiling that plan with their IDE CD-ROM's!) ;-)
2001-01-08-13:23:12 Brian Tao:
Both of those use 50GB and 72GB SCSI JBOD... probably about US$15K per terabyte, but still very fast and very reliable.
Hmm. JBOD can be "very reliable", it all depends on you getting lucky and getting a good batch of drives. But if all you want is fast and as reliable as your luck-of-the-drive-pick can get you, $15K/TB is kinda high; with the $250/80GB EIDE drives, on $50/4-channel RAID 0/1/0+1 controllers, run in pure striping for JBOD, a TB would be just 3 controllers full, $3000 for the drives, plus $150 for the controllers, plus however much you need to spend for the boxes to hold 12 drives. It's easy to find systems that will hold 4 drives comfortably for really cheap, so perhaps that's 3 boxes/TB, easy to assemble for $2k/ea, $6k/TB. And if you decide you want better reliability, go to RAID 0+1 for $12k/TB.
I'd rather not have any IDE drives in my servers if I can help it (and Sun is foiling that plan with their IDE CD-ROM's!) ;-)
I dunno, I've long built systems with nothing but SCSI, but I think these new drives re-open the question anyway for cases where performance is simply not a concern. Sure, they'll be slow, but if speed doesn't matter, and you can do RAID 0+1 with hardware raid controllers for less than the cost of JBOD using SCSI, I think I'd probably build the boxes with EIDE.
Please everyone, before you climb all over me and pound me to a pulp, note that I'm not advocating such homebrew hacks as an alternative to the Netapp. The discussion seems to me to be marginally relevant on the toasters list just because it's good to periodically stick your head up and peer around at the whole surrounding landscape, to see where you lie on it. But there's little overlap between Netapps (medium expensive, but breathtakingly fast, reliable, and effortless to administer, maintain, and back up) and this sort of homebrew disk farm (really really cheap, not especially fast, more or less reliable depending on whether you mirror and the quality of pieces you get, very very manual and systems admin intensive to set up and maintain).
Of course, the downsides to the cheap solution, which define Netapp's singular franchize, aren't guaranteed to remain in place forever, but they certainly apply today.
-Bennett
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Bennett Todd -
Brian Tao -
Mohler, Jeff