We’re probably going to need a large amount of disk space shortly. It’s basically somewhere to back things up so it doesn’t need to be terribly fast. I’ve been having a look around and I’ve come up with two possibilities.
- 24TB SATA
- 4U
- Software RAID (ZFS)
- well engineered
- Sun support
- 20k with academic pricing
- 27TB SATA
- 6U
- Hardware RAID (Areca 110)
- DNUK rails are usually horrid
- 13k full price
The x4500 is smaller and I know it will be less hassle to physically install. But the DNUK box is a lot cheaper and has more storage. From looking at the hardware specs I think that the x4500 is the superior product but I’ve no reason to believe the Teravault won’t get the job done.
If anyone has had hands-on experience of either box I would really like to here about it.
Have you thought about Amazon S3? Though with that kinda storage requirement, it might well be cheaper to do yourself.
Stumbled across your site. Couple thoughts: remote management…can’t beat the Sun remote management card in this server. Very nice, easy to use, eliminated the need for a KVM for us (when running Windows on Opterons). And the new Sun rails….the best I’ve worked with, even better than Dell’s RapidRails.
If the Sun box is too pricy, try to run Solaris 10 w/ ZFS on the white-box hardware. Find something like the Teravault with components in the Solaris 10 HCL. The Teravault would probably work, except the Areca 1170 isn’t in the HCL (but the 1110 is, and it looks like a similar architecture with fewer ports).
I’ve been bitten by silent bitrot in RAID5 three times in the last month, and am sick of rebuilding raidgroups. The scrubbing features of ZFS should help prevent that, and ZFS is super easy to use. I’ve got 61 SCSI disks in a ZFS pool (RAIDZ2 and a hot spare) and they’ve been humming along great for 3 months.
Simon, we already use S3 to back up our subversion system. For this amount of data the cost and also the speed issues argue for a self-hosted solution. Because we are a big university we have the option of hosting kit in machine rooms accross campus which gives us safety in case of primary site failure but still gives us decent bandwidth. If we were paying for commercial hosting and connectivity the calculation would be different.
Steve, I totally agree about the Sun rails. I’ve got other x-series boxes, they are a joy to install. The ILO has SSH which makes remote management much easier. With the Teravault I’d need a console server as well. I also agree that ZFS is very easy to look after. Our primary storage will be served by V880s running Solaris 10 and ZFS.
x4500 is your best bet. Currently Sun is selling it at 50% discount as part of their 25th anniversary celebration. You can’t beat $1/GB, not to mention the high quality construction. It is designed for the very type of workload you’re describing, run in a remote corner and do your job. I’d set it up with a Raid-Z with 3 hot spares. That’ll mean you don’t have to worry about it for a good 3 years; disks fail and get swapped out and you don’t have to worry about replacing them. Fail in place is the approach.
Huw,
If this decision hasn’t been made yet, mail me in work; we had a pair of x4500s turn up yesterday on try and buy and there’s no reason why you couldn’t abuse one for a while.
Ceri