Re: how can we help DSA save money
]] Steven Chamberlain
> On 2013-07-22 15:49, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> > It's not, it's a limitation of resizing a raid and that requiring about
> > a billion seeks across the disk surface.
>
> I didn't realise it was hardware RAID.
>
> If for example it is possible to create multiple, smaller hardware RAIDs
> over time, then maybe all that is needed is a small code change to
> snapshot.d.o to spread files across multiple mountpoints, which would
> surely be worth it.
I don't think the extra complexity that would entail would be worth it,
and it's anyway moot until that code shows up. The current snapshot
hosting is just about full.
> But it seems to me that software RAID, probably running free Debian
> software, can someday reduce need of some hardware, if it were reliable,
> performed well and could be managed easily. (It seems DSA are now doing
> this for compute resources, through OpenStack and ganeti).
(We're not yet doing it with openstack, we've talked about doing it,
though.)
Running software raid on disks on a SAN is asking for trouble as well as
poor performance. Your disks are at the end of a network and
multiplying the number of requests going over that network is a recipe
for poor performance.
> I just like the idea that Debian can strive to develop such things for
> its own infrastructure needs. I think storage makes for a good
> long-term project, but there may be others that could yield higher savings.
I'd love to have good and free SAN solutions that one could buy and get
warranties for replacement parts on. Sadly, we're not there today, and
I'm not aware of anything obvious on the horizon either.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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