Re: Sun Fire X2100 -- nForce4 Ultra desktop chipset

Eugen Leitl <eugen@xxxxxxxxx> · Sun, 27 Nov 2005 10:02:27 +0100

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 06:49:36PM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> You'd be surprised.

Pointers? (Barebone with CPU and memory, no drives, good engineering,
about 600 EUR).

> > The system has 2x GBit Ethernet,
> 
> GbE on its own means nothing.

It means that I don't have a storage subsystem
which can feed each machine at 200 MByte/s. My current HA NFS
system (dual mini-ITX) maxes out at about two orders of magnitude
less.

> > The redundancy can be achieved with a distributed file system,
> 
> At a massive performance penalty.

Distributed file systems like Lustre and PVFS scale with
the number of nodes. For my purposes (unified filestore
in the rack, serving the world through a single 100 MBit
Ethernet port) it's more than sufficient. I'm more concerned
about power requirements than speed. Another must is redundancy,
and remote management.

> > or a AoE SATA enclosure.
> 
> Don't tell me you've bought into their marketing too?  ;->
> CoRAID's performance is crap, as well as its features (or lackthereof).

I've never used it, but if it provides a couple
of TBytes at 30-60 MByte/s throughput and failover
for a reasonable price (say, 3 k$) that would be 
sufficient.

> But let's talk beyond that.
> Redundancy is much cheaper internally.

Which is why I mentioned a distributed file system
spanned over RAID 1 or RAID 5 volumes.

> nForce Professional chipsets, as well as the Broadcom ServerWorks
> HT1000.  Mainboards start at $200, both Socket-939 or 940.

I'm not interested in isolated barebones but complete systems,
including CPU, some memory, sliding rails and IMPI or other 
out of band LOM.

> > I've gone with dual Hitachi Deskstar T7250s, which is a reasonable
> > approximation to an enterprise SATA drive.
> 
> Actually, the Western Digital Raptor is an SATA version of the Hitachi
> UltraStar 10k.  But I'd still consider 24x7 rated drives, even in the
> commodity capacities.

I use Raptors in my desktop machines and home servers as the system
drive but it is far too small for the storage volume/unit of rack
space that I need.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a>
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