Performance and cheap storage

[Greg Harris]

On 7/26/06 3:33 PM, "Greg A. Woods" <woods-cyrus at weird.com> wrote:

> At Sun, 23 Jul 2006 23:37:41 +0100,
> Mark Hellman wrote:
>> 
>> Do you think a RAID array like this one:
>>     http://www.infortrend.com/main/2_product/a08u-c2412.asp
>> would be adequate for storing Cyrus mailboxes?
> 
> Using a SCSI host interface isn't going to be nearly so flexible as
> using a Fibre Channel one, especially in the longer run (e.g. if you
> ever want to add more storage, more storage controllers, share them
> amongst multiple hosts, add backup devices and also share them between
> hosts, etc., etc., etc.).
> 
> It might be possible to make it a tiny bit cheaper in the short run --
> however cheap FC host adapters are probably just as fast and usable as
> cheap U320 adapters, but good and powerful U320 adapters are likely as
> expensive as good and powerful FC adapters.  U320 seems more finnicky
> than FC to me too.
> 
> 
> That particular storage array looks adequate -- at least for some
> unspecified combination of Cyrus users and storage capacity.  :-)

If your really looking for flexibility, check out Left Hand Networks
solution.  Their claim is that they can beat FC stuff.  Not having the need
for speed at this point, I can't testify personally for how fast, but the
solution looks like an awesome concept with lots of real world app.

Later,

Greg Harris