Ask Slashdot: Linux and Fibre Channel Storage Systems

whosebob asks: "I've recently been hired to build a high-end video server system for use in an educational environment. In order to calm management's fears over compatability and support, the server (quad 500MHz/512K cache PIII Xeons) will be running NT 4.0 (I can hear the catcalls already). Given the educational setting and thus the constant search for cost-cutting measures, it would be fantastic to abandon Microsoft for Linux. But as a comparative novice in the Linux OS world, I need to know if it can make full use of my hardware (64-bit PCI bus, TBs of storage) and whether or not anyone has developed the necessary drivers for the fibre-channel interface. Any pertinent information, suggestions, advice, corrections, etc. will be greatly appreciated." There's more. Hit the link.

"The connection to the Clariion storage sub-system will be made using point-to-point Fibre-Channel via two Emulex LP8000 64-bit PCI host bus adapters over copper connections/cables. The FC interfaces and a Gb NIC will be plugged into a triple-peer 64-bit PCI bus. The whole thing should be able to sustain approximately 120 simultaneous MPEG feeds at 1.2Mbps/feed on our 100baseT LAN."

Eventually, we will be clustering several servers in order to increase the number of simultaneous feeds, and also plan to expand video-on-demand service (educational only, primarily for foreign language curriculcum) to the dorms and other locations on campus, possibly the Internet at large if permission is granted from the video title's author (sorry guys, no free StarWars d/l's). Our initial storage capacity will be 180 GB (approx. 144 GB w/ RAID 3 striping). But we expect to scale up to 2 TB in the next two years.

Another advantage to using Linux would be its clustering support (under Caldera for example). We will need that capability soon, and Microsoft still seems to be dragging behind, with only a handful of 3rd party solutions available."

Comments

Go distributed

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens when the machine goes down?

What happens when something... blips.

What happens when you need to do system upgrades?

What happens when you need to do maintenance?

Building one big fancy server is -- in my opinion -- a really bad approach to solving this problem. Sure, I'd love to have a box like the one you describe. It sounds cool. But having the coolest box on the block does not necessarily build the best solution to the problem.

Suppose instead that you bought a small farm of rack-mount PCs. Equip each with a nice 10K RPM SCSI hard drive and a 100BaseTX network interface. If running Linux or *BSD, such boxen could get by with CPU and memory that is modest by today's standards. NT, well, will require more to do the same job. Such boxes can be put together for around $2k a pop. My guess is that you'll get much more aggregate horsepower building it out of a cluster of such boxes than the same amount of dollars would buy you in a big fancy server.

Then you simply make your software able to cause the video to stream off the box that has it. You might also add the cability for the boxen to automagically clone frequently used streams from their home machine to others and load-balance.

If a server goes down, you just restore its data off of backups onto some of the other ones and shuffle where things are homed.

If you need more capacity, to a pretty high degree, you just buy more inexpensive boxes.

This would of course require some clever software to make it all work. Your application sounds like one where some custom software is involved anyway, and it won't be that hard to do the stuff needed to pull off a clustered solution.