[OpenAFS] Which storage technology to use for terabytes of storage with AFS?

[chas williams - CONTRACTOR]

In message <4750333C.3030706@rampaginggeek.com>,Jason Edgecombe writes:
>next couple of years. Fibre channel seems all the rage, but it's quite
>expensive. I'm open to any and all feedback. What works? What doesn't?
>What offers the best bang for the buck on an OpenAFS server?

i went pretty cheap last time.  i am using solaris volume manager raid1's
on some built-in sata drives on solaris 10.  a hardware raid might handle
disk failures easier (just replace the drive) but nice hardware raids can
be fairly expensive.  svm lets you round-robin read accesses (per thread)
between the mirrors which can potentially boost read performance a bit.
its cheap enough that adding another x86 server isnt very expensive.
each server here fits into 1U and provides +400G.

of course, we are only supporting a couple hundred users.

>This is for an academic environment that fills both academic and
>research needs. Researchers are asking for lots of AFS space (200GB+).
>Of course this needs to be backed up as well.

sata drives just keep getting bigger, so you can pick up a 350GB or
500GB drive fairly cheap.  you can finally get a 5-year warranty on some
sata drives which makes them fairly attractive.