So over 300MB/sec even with 8K blocks, and this is a single 960. I generated that throughput with 6 boxes reading 6 seperate 2GB files. I was actually surprised to see that on a dual-Opteron 246 box I was able to read a stream from the filer at about 92MB/sec.
So I guess today's ultra-fast PCs can indeed move some serious data. Of course, if you don't have a badass NetApp filer you may need to think up some other way of delivering that kind of data rate from disk. Otherwise as someone else suggested a pile-o-RAM and a simple tcp server would do the trick.
To be specific, you probably want to read: http://lists.gentoo.org/pipermail/gentoo-user/20 02 -September/031224.html
This is where Daniel Robbins (Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux) says:
I don't know of anyone on our development team that has a high opinion of XFS. We were all really excited about it at first, but our opinion soured over time as quite a few developers got bitten by the data loss issue.
The filesystem wars continue! Personally, I've been using ext3 on Red Hat production servers and XFS on my Gentoo desktop and haven't had issue with either. Perhaps now that Linus has merged XFS into his kernel, the data loss issues some report with XFS will finally get resolved. The fact that XFS is extent based and filesystems can be arbitrarily grown and shrunk is what attracts me to it. Great for extending a filesystem as you pop more drives into your RAID array..
I too have used a variety of RAID controllers for PCs, and I've probably had the best luck with the current crop of Adaptec controllers - the "SCSI RAID" series, which IIRC Adaptec aquired from DPT.
The line starts with the single channel 2100s and goes up in capacity to the four channel 3410S. Just plug regular SCSI drives into them, use the BIOS mode or provided software to create RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, or RAID5 volumes, and your host operating system sees the volume as a single SCSI target.
Adaptec seem to be fairly open source friendly. Check out the Adaptec Open Source website. They provide drivers and software for both FreeBSD and Linux. It's nice to have software support for the controller so you don't have to boot into the BIOS to make a configuration change. The docs for the 'dpteng' and related tools was sparse, but I suspect most people could figure it out after a bit of farting around. I know FreeBSD includes support for the controllers via the 'asr' driver included by default in the GENERIC kernel. If the driver isn't in by default in your Linux distro, just download from Adaptec. They work splendidly under Windows 2000 as well, if you need that functionality.
Anyhow, just thought I'd share my experience with this relatively inexpensive controller from Adaptec. I have about 40 2100S and 4 3410S controllers in service, and they've been fine so far (and yes, I've had drive failures with them and done replacements without problems so far). They play well with the SCSI enclosure cards too, which is nice for hot-swap systems and "fancier" rack mount arrays.
On a FreeBSD system, you see:
asr0: mem 0xea000000-0xebffffff irq 11 at device 5.1 on pci1
asr0: ADAPTEC 2100S FW Rev. 3607, 1 channel, 256 CCBs, Protocol I2O
ripped straight from Delphi's object pascal I would guess
Given that Microsoft hired away Borland's chief Delphi (and object pascal) architect, Anders Hejlsberg, and that Anders' name is on the C# language specification, this should come as no surprise.:)
Naturally, Borland has been attempting to sue Microsoft for its systematic destruction of their company by recruiting all of their top people (mostly on the technical front).
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking just streaming some big video files, even a single FAS960 will have no trouble saturating a 2.5Gb/sec link. For example:
filer04*> sysstat 2
CPU NFS CIFS HTTP Net kB/s Disk kB/s Tape kB/s Cache
in out read write read write age
12% 2664 0 0 557 406 44 0 0 0 34
73% 27430 0 0 2878 87207 13236 0 0 0 34
100% 37447 0 0 6597 317242 2823 0 0 0 34
100% 37265 0 0 6390 315388 3120 1741 0 0 34
100% 37453 0 0 6386 316227 2518 0 0 0 34
So over 300MB/sec even with 8K blocks, and this is a single 960. I generated that throughput with 6 boxes reading 6 seperate 2GB files. I was actually surprised to see that on a dual-Opteron 246 box I was able to read a stream from the filer at about 92MB/sec.
So I guess today's ultra-fast PCs can indeed move some serious data. Of course, if you don't have a badass NetApp filer you may need to think up some other way of delivering that kind of data rate from disk. Otherwise as someone else suggested a pile-o-RAM and a simple tcp server would do the trick.
To be specific, you probably want to read:
0 02 -September/031224.html
http://lists.gentoo.org/pipermail/gentoo-user/2
This is where Daniel Robbins (Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux) says:
I don't know of anyone on our development team that has a high opinion of XFS. We were all really excited about it at first, but our opinion soured over time as quite a few developers got bitten by the data loss issue.
The filesystem wars continue! Personally, I've been using ext3 on Red Hat production servers and XFS on my Gentoo desktop and haven't had issue with either. Perhaps now that Linus has merged XFS into his kernel, the data loss issues some report with XFS will finally get resolved. The fact that XFS is extent based and filesystems can be arbitrarily grown and shrunk is what attracts me to it. Great for extending a filesystem as you pop more drives into your RAID array..
I too have used a variety of RAID controllers for PCs, and I've probably had the best luck with the current crop of Adaptec controllers - the "SCSI RAID" series, which IIRC Adaptec aquired from DPT.
The line starts with the single channel 2100s and goes up in capacity to the four channel 3410S. Just plug regular SCSI drives into them, use the BIOS mode or provided software to create RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, or RAID5 volumes, and your host operating system sees the volume as a single SCSI target.
Adaptec seem to be fairly open source friendly. Check out the Adaptec Open Source website. They provide drivers and software for both FreeBSD and Linux. It's nice to have software support for the controller so you don't have to boot into the BIOS to make a configuration change. The docs for the 'dpteng' and related tools was sparse, but I suspect most people could figure it out after a bit of farting around. I know FreeBSD includes support for the controllers via the 'asr' driver included by default in the GENERIC kernel. If the driver isn't in by default in your Linux distro, just download from Adaptec. They work splendidly under Windows 2000 as well, if you need that functionality.
Anyhow, just thought I'd share my experience with this relatively inexpensive controller from Adaptec. I have about 40 2100S and 4 3410S controllers in service, and they've been fine so far (and yes, I've had drive failures with them and done replacements without problems so far). They play well with the SCSI enclosure cards too, which is nice for hot-swap systems and "fancier" rack mount arrays.
On a FreeBSD system, you see:
asr0: mem 0xea000000-0xebffffff irq 11 at device 5.1 on pci1
asr0: ADAPTEC 2100S FW Rev. 3607, 1 channel, 256 CCBs, Protocol I2O
-Mark
ripped straight from Delphi's object pascal I would guess
:)
Given that Microsoft hired away Borland's chief Delphi (and object pascal) architect, Anders Hejlsberg, and that Anders' name is on the C# language specification, this should come as no surprise.
Naturally, Borland has been attempting to sue Microsoft for its systematic destruction of their company by recruiting all of their top people (mostly on the technical front).