[Beowulf] storage server hardware considerations

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:49:47AM -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:

> I've been building cheap, big, slow storage servers for our use. 
> However, some of our users are starting to need higher performance IO. 
> We still don't have a lot of money, but I'd like to provide something 
> with a modest amount of storage (at least 500GB) that can at least 
> handle full GigE, perhaps up to DDR Infiniband for future expansion, 
> without breaking the bank.

If it has to be cheap I'd take e.g. a Sun with 8x 2.5" SATA drives,
using 300 GByte WD VelociRaptors as a stripe over mirrors, or 15 
krpm SAS drives. 

Right now you can populate a SuperMicro chassis with 16x SATA 3.5"
achieving e.g. a 24 GByte dual-socket Nehalem with 32 TByte raw
storage (WD RE4; 4.8 TByte with WD VelociRaptor) for about 
6.2 kEUR sans VAT.
 
> We have only about 10 compute machines so we're pretty small.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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