Storage woes... again

[Kostas Georgiou]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 04:48:02PM -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:

> Right now we're storing our stuff on some pretty quick netapps, which 
> stinks considering that koji is only accessing a small percentage of 
> that storage at any point in time and even then... its over NFS.  I'd 
> like to propose we move to cheaper storage that is dedicated to just 
> koji.  There are a number of options to do this, including different 
> models of netapps.  I'm putting a spreadsheet together that takes in to 
> consideration price, how much we get and figures out how much it costs / 
> G / month over a 4 year period.  If you guys know of anything to add to 
> the list just let me know.

For "cheap" storage the most popular solution in the HEP (High Energy
Physics) community are linux boxes with 3ware raid controllers. The
Areca controllers have also appeared lately in some places and since
the driver is now part of the kernel I expect to see more of them.
A few Sun thumpers started to show up (just one site added something
around 1PB recently with them) and they are very good solutions if your
space is limited (48 sata slots in 4U). If you bought the ZFS hype (I
am not convinced yet) they are even more attractive.

Cheers,
Kostas Georgiou