Re: SAN/NAS options

Charles,

On 1/14/06 6:37 PM, "Charles Sprickman" <spork(at)bway(dot)net> wrote:

> I'm vaguely considering pairing these two devices:
>
> http://www.areca.us/products/html/products.htm
>
> That's an Areca 16 channel SATA II (I haven't even read up on what's new
> in SATA II) RAID controller with an optional U320 SCSI daughter card to
> connect to the host(s).

I'm confused - SATA with a SCSI daughter card? Where does the SCSI go?

The Areca has a number (8,12,16) of single drive attach SATA ports coming
out of it, each of which will go to a disk drive connection on the
backplane.

> http://www.chenbro.com.tw/Chenbro_Special/RM321.php
>
> How can I turn that box down? Those people in the picture look very
> excited about it? Seriously though, it looks like an interesting and
> economical pairing that gives me most of what I'm looking for:

What a picture! I'm totally enthusiastic all of a sudden! I'm putting !!!
at the end of every sentence!

We just bought 4 very similar systems that use the chassis from California
Design - our latest favorite source:
http://www.asacomputers.com/

They did an excellent job of setting the systems up, with proper labeling
and Quality Control. They also installed Fedora Core 4 and set up the
filesystems, the only mistake they made was that they didn't enable 2TB
clipping so that we had to rebuild the RAIDs (and install CentOS with the
xfs filesystem).

We paid $10.4K each for 16x 400GB WD RE2 SATA II drives, 16GB RAM and two
Opteron 250s. We also put a single 200GB SATA system drive into each. RAID
card is the 3Ware 9550SX.

Performance has been stunning - we're getting 800MB/s sustained I/O
throughput using the two 9550SX controllers in parallel.

> Any thoughts on this? The controller looks to be about $1500, the
> enclosure about $400, and the drives are no great mystery, cost would
> depend on what total capacity I'm looking for.

I'd get ASA to build it for you - use the Tyan 2882 series motherboard for
greatest stablity. They may try to sell you hard on the SuperMicro boards,
we've had less luck with them.

> Our initial plan is to set one up for storage for a mail archive project,
> and to also have a host use this storage to host replicated copies of all
> Postgres databases. If things look good, we'd start moving our main PG
> hosts to use a similar RAID box.

Good approach.

I'm personally spending as much time using these machines as I can - they
are the fastest I've been on in a *long* time.

- Luke