building a RAID system - 8 drives - drive-net - tapes

[Nicholas Henke]

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 01:43, Bill Broadley wrote:
> On the hardware vs software RAID thread.  A friend needed a few TB and
> bought a high end raid card (several $k), multiple channels, enclosure,
> and some 10's of 73GB drives for somewhere in the $50k-$100k neighborhood.
> 
> He needed the capacity and a minumum of 50MB/sec sequential write
> performance (on large sequential writes).  He didn't get it.  Call #1 to
> dell resulted in well it's your fault, it's our top of the line, it should
> be plenty fast, bleah, bleah, bleah.  Call #2 lead to an escalation to
> someone with more of a clue, tune paramater X, tune Y, try a different
> raid setup, swap out X, etc.  After more testing without helping call #3
> was escalated again someone fairly clued answered.  The conversation went
> along the lines of what, yeah, it's dead slow.  Yeah most people only
> care about the reliability.  Oh performance?  We use linux + software
> raid on all the similar hardware we use internally at Dell.
> 
> So the expensive controller was returned, and 39160's were used in it's
> place (dual channel U160) and performance went up by a factor of 4 or
> so.  

Can you give more concrete pointers to the hardware that they ended up
using ? -- specifically the enclosure.

Thanks!
Nic
-- 
Nicholas Henke
Penguin Herder & Linux Cluster System Programmer
Liniac Project - Univ. of Pennsylvania


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