[Beowulf] Any recommendations for a good JBOD?

[Tim Cutts]

On 19 Feb 2010, at 11:56 pm, Mark Hahn wrote:

> however, I'm not actually claiming iSCSI is prevalent.  the protocol
> is relatively heavy-weight, and it's really only providing SAN access,
> not shared, file-level access, which is ultimately what most want...

iSCSI seems fairly common in the virtualisation world, especially for  
lower-performance failover VMware clusters and the like.  Fairly  
commonly see a fibrechannel-connected active cluster, and iSCSI backup  
for disaster recovery, with some sort of block-level replication going  
on between the two.  We've been looking at iSCSI for our VMware setup  
in the future.  As people have been saying, performance isn't stellar,  
an to get it decent you still end up paying a lot of money on  
networking kit, because ideally in that scenario you still want the  
storage traffic on a separate network from everything else (certainly  
from the Vmotion and fault tolerance traffic, and probably from the  
application traffic as well) so you frequently see designs with ESX  
servers with 6-8 NICs in them.  2 for application traffic, 2 for  
VMware's internal traffic, at least 2 for storage traffic.

But for HPC?  Nah - can't really see its utility.

Tim


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