Re: SCSI disk: still the way to go?

On 5/31/06, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> > When we were trying to do DW stuff on Linux + Opteron + FibreChannel +
> > EMC DiskArray, we too frequently found filesystems keeling over. It
> > was neither cheap nor reliable.

I completely agree with the above statements with a small objection.
At our place we tried out a 70k$ SAN from a major vendor and hooked up
all the 2g fibre cables only to find out the box could only do around
50mb/sec in real world bonnie++/dd tests. It was a huge mess...the
performance team from the vendor couldn't do anything about it except
to try and upsell us to the 200k$ product. All the time we could
never get hard numbers about what the box was supposed to do, etc.
Meanwhile the sales reps were lecturing us about 'enterprise this,
enterprise that'....barf.

now for the objection:
I think you guys need to take a look Xyratex, specifically their FC
attached SAS enclosure. It is dual 4gb fc and can hook up SAS or SATA
drives. best of all, it's cost competitve with attached scsi for
total system cost. The flexibilty of being able to hook up SATA or SAS
is great.

merlin