Terabyte storage solution?
2007-12-24 21:17:00
Our situation is that we're processing large data sets in SAS and need
about 1TB of storage to process that. The data files will total ~250GB and
we need 3 times as much to perform the analysis on it.
For those unfamiliar with SAS, it's statistical analysis software. So we
also need some computing power.
I need some suggestions and opinions on possible solutions. We have come
up with two possible solutions, but I would some experienced help in
talking to management.
Requirements:
* 1 terabyte of storage (high I/O because of large file reads/writes)
* under $10k (possibly $15k)
* computing power (compare systems below)
Solution 1: Adding additional storage to Sun E450.
Currently the E450 is running Solaris 7, but is probably misconfigured.
(running multiple jobs never goes over 50%). We have 2-400Mhz processors
and 1GB of physical memory. It is currently hosting a 252GB Fibre Channel
Array and a 200GB drive array. It is exporting NFS filesystems right now
to a couple of other systems. Other than that, it is only running SAS to
crunch these statistics.
Solution 2: Build new Linux machine with IDE-RAID
The suggested specs for the new machine would be:
* Dual Athlon XP 1900+
* 2GB DDR SDRAM
* 3ware Escalade 6800 controller (hardware based RAID5)
* Western Digital 120GB 7200rpm HD (8 of them)
* other miscellaneous stuff (kb, monitor, etc)
I would like to know the approximate costs of either solution (I know
building the new machine would cost ~$5k). Also the performance to be
expected (which one will be "faster") in terms of computing and storage
performance.
Any other suggestions other than those 2 solutions would be helpful.
Also comments, opinions would be great!
(Sorry for being long-winded, but I'm not very familiar with providing
this much storage or Sun hardware).
Thien
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