Sean Davis
2009-Mar-16 22:01 UTC
[Gluster-users] Single server (NAS) and gluster advantages
We have a largish NAS, a single linux box, with 40 drives. They are currently configured as 2 RAID-6 arrays. The machine has two RAID controllers. This serves as a file system for a small cluster with about 10 nodes, 60 processors, total. We have some very IO-intensive applications that simply crush our NAS. Load averages go to 40+ and we see about 40% wait. The RAID is incredibly fast with about 700 MB/second serial read, but the sustained concurrent access is much lower. We would like to look at how gluster could be used to speed up concurrent access to this single machine. Any insights into using gluster in this type of situation? We thought about slicing up the 40 drives into 8 RAID-5 partititions and then serving them using gluster. We wanted to stay away from full AFR given the increased cost/TB. We are mainly interested in knowing whether we need another machine or whether we can make do with our current NAS after reconfiguring to use gluster. Thanks, Sean -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://supercolony.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20090316/b648e1f3/attachment.html>
i'm not sure wether i got everything right. you are using glusterfs as a substitute for nfs. if you are using it on infiniband, then you probably could get some performance with combining io-threads, write-behind and as many raid-5 partitions the controller could handle. on ethernet i thing glusterfs isnt yet fast enough for io-killers, but probably it could be performing better than nfs using perfomance-translators on the client side. Io Noci Sean Davis schrieb:> We have a largish NAS, a single linux box, with 40 drives. They are > currently configured as 2 RAID-6 arrays. The machine has two RAID > controllers. This serves as a file system for a small cluster with > about 10 nodes, 60 processors, total. We have some very IO-intensive > applications that simply crush our NAS. Load averages go to 40+ and > we see about 40% wait. The RAID is incredibly fast with about 700 > MB/second serial read, but the sustained concurrent access is much > lower. We would like to look at how gluster could be used to speed up > concurrent access to this single machine. Any insights into using > gluster in this type of situation? We thought about slicing up the 40 > drives into 8 RAID-5 partititions and then serving them using > gluster. We wanted to stay away from full AFR given the increased > cost/TB. We are mainly interested in knowing whether we need another > machine or whether we can make do with our current NAS after > reconfiguring to use gluster. > > Thanks, > Sean > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Gluster-users mailing list > Gluster-users at gluster.org > http://zresearch.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users >