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Re: storage server & scalability



On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 04:54:30PM +0100, Qweb - Yavuz Aydin wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Because of variuos reasons we would like to use a custom-built storage  
> server. This storage server would need to be accessed by nfs. We need  
> advice with 2 issues.
> 
Where I work we have a storage server that is accessible via NFS.  It
causes us no end of grief.  I am currently trying to push for a
migration to something sane, like AFS or Lustre, or even Red Hat's GFS.
The problem is that NFS is a workgroup filesystem, not a true
distributed filesystem.  Since you are talking about a cluster, you
might want something more robust instead of NFS.

> Issue 1:
> It seems obvious that SCSI is the way to go. However, because of the  
> simple fact that (S)ATA provides much more capacity (and is far less  
> expensive) we would like to know what you think of using SATA drives  
> in a storage server. And what RAID level would be a good choice? It  
> may be good to know that we will setup 2 identical storage servers,  
> one as a hot-spare, which syncs it's disks with DRBD from the main  
> storage server. Off-course we will be using heartbeat to take over the  
> ip on the hot-spare once the main storage becomes unavailable.
> 
SATA should be OK.

> Issue 2:
> Another question which remains unanswered for us is how one would  
> scale storage. For example, if we setup a storage server with RAID 5  
> or RAID 6, how can we extend the RAID array with more capacity,  
> without losing data? Would it be as simple as plugging in another disk  
> at the array?
> 
Check out LVM.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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