[Gllug] Hardware recommendation, esp. SANs and shared storage

[John Hearns]

On Thu, 2002-08-08 at 17:16, Matthew Kirkwood wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We're looking to put together some fairly hefty Oracle
> servers, initially configured as primary and standby, but
> ultimately we're planning to go the real application
> clustering route, as the business people think load could
> quadruple in a year, and the finance people believe them
> :-)
> 
> There was some discussion on this list a while back about
> external storage. Someone mentioned a company based in
> Wimbledon who do beige-box fibrechannel storage, but I
> can't find it in the archive. 
Dot Hill.
I think their products look good - but you've got to 
investigate yourself.
No harm in getting the salesmen in.
Also talk to Alistair Kergon about GFS?



Strangely enough, this place is going all NAS with
commodity boxen - racks and racks of Elonex Linux boxes
with JBODs and gig ethernet cards. Yawn....


On the subject of storage, I went to a great seminar
yesterday by Jai Menon from IBM
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/storagesystems/
Amazing stuff - sorry it wasn't webcast, or I would have put
out a warning.

He was talking about their Storage Tank philosophy - cool.
And going from 1Tbyte per storage admin to the era of
1Petabyte per admin.

But what really interested me was IceCube
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/storagesystems/IceCube/index.html
(yes - I know this was on Slashdot)
They are planning a protoype of a 3x3x3 array of bricks-
a "huggable Library of Congress" as it has enough storage
for that. 
He showed ideas of towers of bricks being cooled by glycol/water
filled cooling busses. 
Networking may be via Infiniband (my favourite).
Even some blue sky thoughts to have 'computational bricks'.
So you would just pile up storage bricks and compute bricks
in a big heap.

There is a philosophy of 'fail in place' also -
so if one of the bricks dies in the middle of the heap you just
leave it and route round it.

I would say Icecube is 'cool' too, but that would be a bad pun.
And besides I asked a stupid question about cooling the things,
and compared them with nuclear reactor failsafe cooling.


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