Hi,
I have been running an X4500 as a storage node for about a year.
I have configured ZFS with a single pool of 20 mirrored pairs.
(i.e. 40 disks, 500GB disks, 10 TB of space). This was the
result of reading the white paper of ZFS performance available
at the time. Hopefully I can get a second node with the 1 TB
disks soon.
I added one ZFS file system per advanced file device.
All our backups go to the advanced file devices. They are later
cloned to one set of tapes, and staged to a different set of tapes.
One set is taken offsite.
There are 3 LTO-3 and 2 LTO-2 drives attached to the Storage Node.
(These drives are in SL8500 tape library. No Drive Sharing.) There
is no Legato Support to have the library controlled by the 4500, so
that is controlled by the main server (v440) via ACLS running on a
dedicated X4100.
There are 4 x 1GB ethernet ports. In our case 3 are configured in
one bundle to one switch, with the fourth as a failover to a different
switch. I have seen just over 2Gbps on the bundled link.
Client-side compression is used.
The cloning staging process is managed by a local script and is
started before the backups finish. It attempts to run 2 x LTO-3 and
2 x LTO-2 drives simultaneously. They run at close to theoretical
speed 78 MB/sec (LTO-3), 34 MB/sec (LTO-2).
Monitoring the disk io-traffic, I have never seen a single internal
disk exceed 15% utilisation under the above load.
Nightly backups are in the range 2TB - 5TB depending on which full dumps
are run.
I am in the process of adding dual 4Gbps FC HBAs and 2 more LTO-3
drives. Not sure what the limit will be.
Tim Nicholson
Network Services
Information and Communications Technology
The University of Sydney
On 26/03/2008, at 10:19 AM, Brett Monroe wrote:
Hey all,
We are looking at maybe getting a X4500 as a storage node and I am
wondering what your observations have been on performance reading and
writing to and from the internal disks. For those of you using
X4500s, what has your peak and sustained reads and writes per second
(from iostat) been? Also, are any of you using Sun's PCI-X based 10
Gbps Ethernet card? What sort of bandwidth are you seeing with it.
Thanks
--Brett
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