[Beowulf] Question on hgh performance, low cost Fileserver

Paulo Afonso Lopes pal at di.fct.unl.pt
Tue Nov 22 13:03:06 PST 2005


Michael, I agree with John, but I wonder about the CPU drain on the file
servers to keep up with the demand; it will be nice to have numbers on
some simple benchmarks (bonnie, iozone,...) once you have it up and
running...

Regards,

paulo

> Interesting... a sort of 'poor man's multipathing'
> You would have to closely monitor that the mirroring over the network
> link is up and running.
> Also look at http://www.drbd.org/ which might be the cat's pyjamas for
> this application.
>

> On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 17:12 -0800, Michael Will wrote:
>> I have not completely though this out yet, but what about something like
>> this:
>>
>> Have 1U or 2U servers with internal drives split into two (software)
>> raid volumes.
>> Connect them with 1 ethernet cable to a switch fabric to serve half of
>> the storage.
>>
>> Connect them in pairs with the second gigabit ethernet cable directly
>> (crossover,
>> same cable as non-crossover since it is gigabit, most mainboards have
>> two nics down
>> nowadays)
>> use network-block-device to mirror one of the two groups to the other
>> server.
>>


--
Paulo Afonso Lopes                        | Tel: +351- 21 294 8536
Departamento de Informática               | 294 8300 ext.10763
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia        | Fax: +351- 21 294 8541
Universidade Nova de Lisboa               | e-mail: pal at di.fct.unl.pt
2829-516 Caparica, PORTUGAL




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