Re: Cheap RAID system recommendation?

In comp.unix.solaris Rick Denoire <100.17706_at_germanynet.de> wrote:
> Hello *.admin

> 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$.

> This is what we need:

> - sustained transfer rate > 70 MB/s (not on paper, but *measurable*)
> - fastest SCSI flavor available (fiber channel would be way to
> expensive)
> - disks with 15000 RPM for small latency
> - 400 GB capacity total, equivalent to 200 GB in a Raid 10 conf.
> - no special features except a battery buffered cache
> - greater number of spindles are preferred over bigger disks

> 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.

By the way, you might have to do with fiber channel solutions if you need to connect to an Ultra2 a disk system that needs to sustain transfer rates faster than 40MB/second. I have never heard of an SBUS SCSI card that supports modes faster than UltraSCSI (either single-ended or differential). In fact, lots of A1000/D1000 users, often use the slow Fast/Wide differential SCSI SBUS cards to connect to the disk arrays (this could be your problem too, double check what kind of card you have). If you need something faster, consider Sun T3 disk array for workgroup. It more or less meets your specs (except that it uses 10K RPM disks but it has a much faster RAID controller with up to 1GB of cache). This list price is well above $30,000 but you could try to negotiate a better deal with Sun's sales people.

-- 
Akop Pogosian

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