[Beowulf] Big storage

[Toon Knapen]

We're looking into: http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com/ and it's 
looking really great.

t

Jakob Oestergaard wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> While not a typical beowulf, I thought the list would have some input for this
> "storage cluster" or whatever we should call it :)
> 
> I'm looking at getting some big storage. Of all the parameters, getting as low
> dollars/(month*GB) is by far the most important. The price of acquiring and
> maintaining the storage solution is the number one concern.
> 
> The setup will probably have a number of "head nodes" which receive a large
> amount of data over standard gigabit from a large amount of remote sources.
> Data is read infrequently from the head nodes by remote systems. The primary
> load on the system will be data writes.
> 
> The head nodes need not see the same unified storage; so I am not required to
> have one big shared filesystem. If beneficial, each of the head nodes could
> have their own local storage.
> 
> The storage pool will start out at around 100TiB and will grow to ~1PiB within
> a year or two (too early to tell). It would be nice to use as few racks as
> possible, and as little power as possible  :)
> 
> It *might* be possible to offload older files to tape; does anyone have
> experience with HSM on Linux?  Does it work?  Could it be worthwhile to
> investigate?
> 
> One setup I was looking at, is simply using SunFire X4500 systems (you can put
> 48 standard 3.5" SATA drives in each 4U system). Assuming I can buy them with
> 1T SATA drives shortly, I could start out with 3 systems (12U) and grow the
> entire setup to 1P with 22 systems in little over two full racks.
> 
> Any better ideas?  Is there a way to get this more dense without paying an arm
> and a leg?  Has anyone tried something like this with HSM?
> 
> Thanks all, your input will be greatly appreciated! :)
>