[OpenAFS] High Speed AFS Access

[Aaron Stanley]

So I've been kicking around an idea for a very large storage array to use
for on-line access to hard drive images.  I already have a stable,
multi-city AFS cluster and would really like to integrate this disk server
into the AFS cluster for security and simplicity reasons.

What I'm wondering, as I've seen the disk speed statistics from
http://www.e.kth.se/~jimmy/afsfsperf/afsfsperf.html and I'm wondering if
anybody here has been able to benchmark their fileservers above the
seemingly 22MB/sec boundary.

I'd like to provide 12 ports of channel-bonded gigabit Ethernet connectivity
to 10-12 gigabit connected clients (or a direct, crossed-over gigabit pipe
per client, whatever is faster) so that clients can pull files,
theoretically, at about 80MB/sec.  Of course I need to get the disks to run
that fast though I have some ideas of using a RAID 5x5 matrix of about 30 of
the fastest 137G SCSI disks I can find spread across 8 channels of U320 SCSI
so that I can get, again theoretically, throughput in excess of a Gigabyte
per second.

Can anybody see a specific problem with AFS and these types of speed
requirements?  I would love to be able to force crypt on this server, but
given the stats on kth.se I wouldn't expect the server to be able to handle
the disk bandwidth and the encryption with any grace.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated and if I do go forward with the plans I
will happily share the benchmarks and specs.

Thanks.

 - AB


-- 
Aaron Stanley
Director, Information Technology
Stroz Friedberg, LLC
15 Maiden Lane, 12th Floor
New York, NY  10038
212/981.6534[o] | 917/859.1503[c] | 815/642.0223[f]


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