From owner-freebsd-stable Mon May 1 16:14:38 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from trinity.skynet.be (trinity.skynet.be [195.238.2.38]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F0F137B6E3; Mon, 1 May 2000 16:14:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from blk@skynet.be) Received: from [195.238.24.94] (dialup684.brussels2.skynet.be [195.238.25.172]) by trinity.skynet.be (Postfix) with ESMTP id B1E6E180F9; Tue, 2 May 2000 01:14:30 +0200 (MET DST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: blk@pop.skynet.be Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200005012300.QAA18195@freeway.dcfinc.com> References: <200005012300.QAA18195@freeway.dcfinc.com> Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 01:10:23 +0200 To: chad@DCFinc.com From: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: How good is AMI MegaRAID support? Cc: parag@cgt.com, msmith@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 4:00 PM -0700 2000/5/1, Chad R. Larson wrote: > We're running quite a bit more than 5,000 iops/sec on the EMC Symmetrix > box that's replacing the A-3500s. Yes, but what's your cost per TB on that platform? I bet it's a *hell* of a lot more than Joe paid for his 1.8TB USENET news spool server he has built! ;-) Seriously, yes you can achieve levels of performance higher than this, but I believe it is likely to take a fair outlay of cash. If all you're doing is building a news spool server and you don't need "drop a nuclear bomb on it and it still runs" reliability (for which you pay a hell of a lot of money for), then it's a waste to be spending that kind of money to get performance that may only be mildly better than what you could build out of raw components and software RAID. > Just depends on what it is you need done. You need to do a proper cost/benefit analysis. In my case, we agreed to sign a three year lease on this thing sight unseen, and it has taken a hell of a lot of work (mostly me by myself) to get this damn thing significantly above the 1000 iops/sec, and most of the benefit has come from adding software striping+mirroring with vinum on top of the hardware. Had we spent a bit more time doing the proper legwork up front, we might have been able to get a lot more disk space for a lot less money, and gotten equal or better performance to boot. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message