Re: Cheap RAID system recommendation?

Rick Denoire wrote:

> We are using a Sun's StorEdge A1000 in a Sun E3500 which happens to be
> extremely stow. Before we realized that it was so slow, we planned to
> buy a second one, but now we are looking for a different Raid system.
> The problem is that due to administrative reasons, we are not allowed
> to spend more money than it was once planned. So we are looking for an
> alternative that won't be more expensive that about 30 000 US$.

	You could lease a system rather than buy. You could also trade in
	the A1000.

> This is what we need:
>
> - sustained transfer rate > 70 MB/s (not on paper, but *measurable*)

        FC-AL.

> - fastest SCSI flavor available (fiber channel would be way to
> expensive)

        Not if you lease.

> - disks with 15000 RPM for small latency

	Hmmm ... if you go with 10K RPM ones it would bring the costs
	down.

> - 400 GB capacity total, equivalent to 200 GB in a Raid 10 conf.

        Does the A1000 support this much capacity?

> - no special features except a battery buffered cache

	You mention elsewhere that its mainly DSS. DSS isn't write
	intensive as far as I'm aware.

> - greater number of spindles are preferred over bigger disks

        That will up your costs but I know what you ask this.

> This is a quite modest system I think. Be aware that a very fast
> system could even be inappropriate for this old fashioned machine (4
> SPARC 2 CPUs at 400 MHz), but of course, latency can never be small
> enough for scattered I/O operations.

        Scattered I/O? With DSS?

> Would you recommend any specific modell for the mentioned machine?
> Dell? IBM? HP?

        Depends. We'd need to see exactly what your app does.

> PS: By the way, nowadays some disks are so fast, that they can almost
> reach a sustained transfer rate of 70 MB/s in single mode!

        Yes, FC-AL is fast.

-am © 2002 Received on Tue Aug 20 2002 - 06:50:48 CDT