Hi Russell, On Tue, 17 Apr 2012, Russell Coker wrote:
A Dell server which can handle 8 disks (all that is needed for the next few years) is not particularly expensive. A PowerEdge T610 costs $2100 plus about $200 per disk (or a lot more per disk if you buy disks from Dell). A PowerEdge T110 costs $700 and can handle 4 disks. .. But in this case the use is going to be 9-5 operation. Batch jobs will be run overnight, but getting a cluster fail-over event to not interrupt the batch jobs would be more effort than it's worth. Getting a system that can handle 8*SATA disks isn't THAT difficult. In the unlikely event that a Dell server entirely broke and Dell couldn't fix it fast enough it would be OK to install a white-box system as a temporary replacement. So the failure recovery case will not be preserving 24*7 operation, but not wasting too much 9-5 time after the problem has been discovered.
I have a pair of Dell servers (T410) inhouse that run amongst others (as the most storage-hungry part) a samba server for a company (60 Windows clients) from 9 to 5. It's not TeraBytes yet, it's slightly below 1, and it using two disks in a mirror. (Not exactly, I have a small base system on a UFS and Swap partition, mainly to avoid deadlocks related to Swap on ZFS - BTRFS does not support swap on it at all yet, AFAIK). I use ZFS and send snapshots (zfs send/receive) to a standby samba jail, and from there weekly backups go to a set of external USB disks. The failover is manual (bringing up the stand-up jail) but wasn't needed over the year I have it in place now. I do the things mentioned before (especially restricting ARC to half of the memory and disabling prefetching) and it works. If needed, I would check what ZFSonLinux does in regards of ACLs in combination of NFS (version?) and ZFS. I am just not informed about it at the moment of writing. Regards Peter