[Beowulf] Big storage

[Peter St. John]

Jeff,
I was musing about the (to me, novel) idea of multi RAID on one box
(probably the head node of a cluster or subcluster), by analogy with CPU
cache levels; RAID0 with a few 10K rpm drives for speed, RAID6 with many
7200 drives for size and reliability; then I'd be able to go fast until a
failure, then rollback to a checkpoint served by the RAID6. This is just a
gedankenexperiment.
I don't have any particular configuration in mind, I don't have a cluster
and it will probably be a small number of superannuated Alpha boxes if I do
it at all this summer.
Peter


On 8/27/07, Jeffrey B. Layton <laytonjb at charter.net> wrote:
>
> Peter St. John wrote:
> > How about using RAID 5 for a working filesystem and RAID 6 for
> > checkpointing? Or is that effectively what 6+1 does?
> > I'm imagining RAID 0 for scratch and virtual memory, so you want three
> > disk systems:-)
> > Peter
>
> Choosing good RAID solutions depends upon what you want to
> do with the particular file system. For example, what do you
> mean by "working file system", "check pointing" and so on?
> You also have to take into account the RAID level, the size of
> the disks, and the probability of a read error. This will help
> you determine what RAID level to chose.
>
> I know this is vague, but we could continue this off-line if you
> like (I don't know if anyone is interested in the details).
>
> Jeff
>
>
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