Why does everyone here seem to have such a hard-on for EMC?!
My dealings with them have been absolutely horrible, plus this person's problem (25TB - 1PB) in a shared/clustered file system isn't a problem that EMC has a solution for....
Centera you say, BULLSHIT. You're not going to be able to scale the Centera very well since it does NFS and NFS pretty much blows if you need really good performance/bandwidth. Ok, you don't have to use NFS you can write your application to the Centera API, but that doesn't work well with legacy applicatons where you cannot change them...
So as far as I know, EMC isn't going to be able to solve this person's LARGE shared/clustered/global/distributed file system problem...
More info on SAM....
SAM-FS and SAM-QFS are both closed source commercial products developed by LSC which was bought by SUN a few years back. At work recently I had a chance to test SAM-QFS, in my lab.
To do a shared SAM-FS(QFS) file system the metadata server must be a Solaris machine. Clients of the file system can be Linux, I forget which kernel versions are currently supported.
The shared file system part of SAM-QFS scales better than RedHat GFS (largest file system = 8TB) by supporting 252 disk luns per filesystem @ 2TB/disk lun.
The HSM archive part of SAM-QFS seemed to have a few issues with very large #'s of files > 40 million, such as file system backup time and containerizing MANY small files into a container to archive. Also SAM-QFS isn't a journaled file system...there wasn't any consistency check done on the file system dump / restore utilities. I could do a dump of the file system, change a block in the dump file, restore the dump, and have corrupted data -- in my case I hex editted the names of file names and restored it and it didn't complain one bit.
I'd be interested in what other people might suggest for a good archive/HSM product. I've looked at ADIC AMASS, ADIC StorNext, FileTek StorHouse RFS, SUN SAM-QFS, HPSS, IBM SAN FS and haven't found one that was good enough and scalable to the 1 billion files/FS and 1+ PB of data level....
For the storage system consider the HP RISS (HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System). It scales well and handles Exchange, and other mail servers. Provides transparent access to your archived email. Allows users to have GB's of email but not have to worry about saving.pst files, etc. Basically an "unlimited" inbox.
To scale the system you add additional "smart cells" which are the storage components of the system (2U servers, 900GB RAID, mirrored onto a second smart cell). To scale throughput, you add additional portal servers which handle the requests.
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Why does everyone here seem to have such a hard-on for EMC?!
My dealings with them have been absolutely horrible, plus this person's problem (25TB - 1PB) in a shared/clustered file system isn't a problem that EMC has a solution for....
Centera you say, BULLSHIT. You're not going to be able to scale the Centera very well since it does NFS and NFS pretty much blows if you need really good performance/bandwidth. Ok, you don't have to use NFS you can write your application to the Centera API, but that doesn't work well with legacy applicatons where you cannot change them...
So as far as I know, EMC isn't going to be able to solve this person's LARGE shared/clustered/global/distributed file system problem...
One of the issues I have with RedHat GFS is that the maximum file system size is 8TB per clustered file system....
More info on SAM.... SAM-FS and SAM-QFS are both closed source commercial products developed by LSC which was bought by SUN a few years back. At work recently I had a chance to test SAM-QFS, in my lab. To do a shared SAM-FS(QFS) file system the metadata server must be a Solaris machine. Clients of the file system can be Linux, I forget which kernel versions are currently supported. The shared file system part of SAM-QFS scales better than RedHat GFS (largest file system = 8TB) by supporting 252 disk luns per filesystem @ 2TB/disk lun. The HSM archive part of SAM-QFS seemed to have a few issues with very large #'s of files > 40 million, such as file system backup time and containerizing MANY small files into a container to archive. Also SAM-QFS isn't a journaled file system...there wasn't any consistency check done on the file system dump / restore utilities. I could do a dump of the file system, change a block in the dump file, restore the dump, and have corrupted data -- in my case I hex editted the names of file names and restored it and it didn't complain one bit. I'd be interested in what other people might suggest for a good archive/HSM product. I've looked at ADIC AMASS, ADIC StorNext, FileTek StorHouse RFS, SUN SAM-QFS, HPSS, IBM SAN FS and haven't found one that was good enough and scalable to the 1 billion files/FS and 1+ PB of data level....
For the storage system consider the HP RISS (HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System). It scales well and handles Exchange, and other mail servers. Provides transparent access to your archived email. Allows users to have GB's of email but not have to worry about saving .pst files, etc. Basically an "unlimited" inbox.
i ss/index.html
To scale the system you add additional "smart cells" which are the storage components of the system (2U servers, 900GB RAID, mirrored onto a second smart cell). To scale throughput, you add additional portal servers which handle the requests.
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/r
Why not just give up on the whole thing and admit the inevitable and find somewhere else to live!?!