There was a T5240 comment posted above, so I figured I'll answer it since I
have it.
It's amazing for this application, bar none the best.
We went from a V240 that on a dual 750mhz system could only drive 80MB/s
maximum to this so it wouldn't have taken much.
Currently we are doing 120MB/s solid on a single Ethernet interface, I can't do
more because our network is so oversubscribed it can't handle that.
Time Int rKB/s
wKB/s rPk/s wPk/s rAvs
wAvs %Util Sat
03:57:36 nxge0 119781 3470.9 81214.9
44123.8 1510.3 80.55 100.00 0.00
03:57:36 nxge1 0.58 0.00
8.93 0.00 66.91 0.00
0.00 0.00
03:57:36 nxge2 0.00 0.00
0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
0.00 0.00
03:57:36 lo0 0.00
0.00 4.96 4.96 0.00
0.00 0.00 0.00
^C
# uptime
3:57am up 65 day(s), 8:27, 4
users, load average: 3.47, 3.64, 3.89
So that's a full ethernet pipe as closed to theoretical max utilization as
you'll ever see using 3.47/120 threads (.028 load), if this scales all the way
out).
We do plan on taking advantage of the onboard 12 threads of Hardware Encryption
to do AES encryption of specific clients (for an upcharge), saving us the
expense of hardware encryption devices and key management and to offset the
server costs.
Inside of the server we have 5 dual ported 4gb HBA's, allowing us to do 4 ports
for VTL, 2 for SnapClones, and 2 for tape drives with 2 ports to spare. This
also leaves us room to put in a 10gb ethernet card for (~$800) when the network
can support this.
On top of all this the server can house 8TB of internal storage, yes that's
right 8TB. This thing has 16 drive bays (8 bay expander is $1000.00) inside of
that you can put in 2.5" SAS laptop drives, I got the Hitachi 500gb 2.5" SAS
drives for $189.00 from ZipZoomFly. Throw these into a large ZFS pool, well
segment off two of the drives with enough space for your boot environment using
SVM to mirror. (Incase we're counting that's 8TB for $4024) I couldn't find
any SPUD brackets to mount these drives, I sent a complaint e-mail to
Jonathan.Schwartz -- at -- sun.com and next morning had a phone call and a week
later had the brackets. Hopefully this issue is resolved but if not Sun has
your back.
But wait we're not done yet... Because of the massive amounts of CPU I'm able
to do ZFS compression on the /nsr/ databases giving me 1.8:1 compression on
indexes, not to mention subblock allocation savings. So I'm able to keep vast
amounts of NSR indexes online, in fact I am probably going to set my browse
retention to 7 years.
We run at a SOLID 7.2TB/hr off of a single gb ethernet interface and I feel
perfectly comfortable that we'll be able to run this thing close to 30-40TB/hr
when fully configured (We have no backup network currently, putting in a 10GB
network).
Total price with 5 Sun branded QLogic HBA's and 16gb of memory (I'm waiting for
the 10gb ethernet to come online to go to 4gb or 8gb DIMM's -- 1gb DIMM's slow
down 10g ethernet considerably -- almost 50%). We payed $22,000 using Sun's
40% off promotion Try and Buy. I don't see that promotion but they're giving a
30% off for any Sun V2xx or 2 x V1xx, HP or IBM server systems.
Further we upgraded to NetWorker 7.4.2 and quickly discovered that we
absolutely could not backup NetWare 4.11 servers. So I made a Solaris Zone
(full not lightweight) and put NetWorker 7.2.1 on it, works flawlessly allowing
me to backup the NetWare environment from a separate Zone on the same 1gb
ethernet interface.
One final note, if you do get a T5240, be sure to enable the Webmin interface
that ships with Solaris (svcadm enable webmin) under Networking there is a
complete firewall rule writing environment as well as bandwidth monitoring that
can generate reports useable for billing by client. -- PS yes I'm logging all
the network bandwidth consumption with no noticeable impact).
Alec Effrat
UNIX/Linux Systems Manager, Americas
Synovate
alec -dot- effrat -at- synovate.com
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