Re: SAN/NAS options

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 01:56:10AM -0500, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> You'll note that I'm being somewhat driven by my OS of choice, FreeBSD.
>
>>Unlike Solaris or other commercial offerings, there is no nice volume
>>management available. While I'd love to keep managing a dozen or so
>>FreeBSD boxes, I could be persuaded to go to Solaris x86 if the volume
>>management really shines and Postgres performs well on it.
>
>
> Have you looked at vinum? It might not qualify as a true volume manager,
> but it's still pretty handy.

I am looking very closely at purchasing a SANRAD Vswitch 2000, a Nexsan
SATABoy with SATA disks, and the Qlogic iscsi controller cards.

Nexsan claims up to 370MB/s sustained per controller and 44,500 IOPS but
I'm not sure if that is good or bad. It's certainly faster than the LSI
megaraid controller I'm using now with a raid 1 mirror.

The sanrad box looks like it saves money in that you don't have to by
controller cards for everything, but for I/O intensive servers such as
the database server, I would end up buying an iscsi controller card anyway.

At this point I'm not sure what the best solution is. I like the idea
of having logical disks available though iscsi because of how flexible
it is, but I really don't want to spend $20k (10 for the nexsan and 10
for the sanrad) and end up with poor performance.

On other advantage to iscsi is that I can go completely diskless on my
servers and boot from iscsi which means that I don't have to have spare
disks for each host, now I just have spare disks for the nexsan chassis.

So the question becomes: has anyone put postgres on an iscsi san, and if
so how did it perform?

schu