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Building a Massive Single Volume Storage Solution?
An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked to build a massive storage solution to scale from an initial threshold of 25TB to 1PB, primarily on commodity hardware and software. Based on my past experience and research, the commercial offerings for such a solution becomes cost prohibitive, and the budget for the solution is fairly small. Some the technologies that I've been scoping out are iSCSI, AoE and plain clustered/grid computers with JBOD (just a bunch of disks). Personally I'm more inclined on a grid cluster with 1GB interface where each node will have about 1-2TB of disk space and each node is based on a 'low' power consumption architecture. Next issue to tackle is finding a file system that could span across all the nodes and yet appear as a single volume to the application servers. At this point data redundancy is not a priority, however it will have to be addressed. My research has not yielded any viable open source alternative (unless Google releases GoogleFS) and I've researched into Lustre, xFS and PVFS. There some interesting commercial products such as the File Director from NeoPath Networks and a few others; however the cost is astronomical.
I would like to know if any Slashdot readers have any experience in build out such a solution? Any help/idea(s) would be greatly appreciated!"
May or may not be what you search. Quite expensive but impressive featurelist.
f tware/gpfs.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/clusters/so
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
My first thought as well. However, he is asking for a single volume solution. So XSAN from Apple would have to be implemented. Good thing that it's compatible with ADIC's solution for cross-platform support.
Probably would be the least expensive option overall and the simplest to implement. Don't take my word for it, go look for yourself.
As a VERY satisfied customer, I say, just buy the damned thing from EMC. There's few enough warm fuzzy feelings that SysAdmins have in this day and age, like your CE calling at 7:00am saying: "Hey, you had a few hard SCSI errors on Disk 3 Enclosure 0 Tray 0 last night, that's your production LUNs isn't it? There should be a courier there with a disk by 10, and I'll stop by to make sure things are hotsparing back properly after you replace the disk okay?" And *THIS* is just because my CE knows I can handle replacing a disk. Normally he'd come out and do that, and sit around while it re-built the Raid Group.
Yeah, EMC costs. THIS is why. The support, when needed, is top top top notch. Which would you rather have in a DR situation?
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
The folks at the Internet Archive have already done the hard work of figuring out how to create a petabyte storage system using commodity hardware. The system works so well they started a company to sell PetaBoxes to others. Why reinvent the wheel?