[Gllug] Maintaining music libraries in various formats / Linux SANs

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Walter Stanish wrote:
>> You can get 1.5TB drives now. 2TB might be poking in too.
>>     
>
> 2TB SATAs have been around for a good while as well (now priced ~£150 for consumer retail, eg: ebuyer.co.uk).
>
> On a related note, not to hijack the thread too much... but does anyone have experience building large SANs for use with Linux / FreeBSD?
>
> I've been investigating a bunch of SAN solutions recently, apparently Linux falls down in this area right now vs. Sun's ZFS.  ZFS is barred from Linux kernel implementation due to licensing issues, and the current FUSE implementation in user-space is supposed to perform poorly.  Due to the lack of obvious solutions, we're now considering Nexenta, which seems to be OpenSolaris' native ZFS implementation wrapped with a (very, very good) Linux-based management layer.
>
> We're looking at a few hundred TB... if anyone has experience on this scale I'd love to get in touch.  The main requirement is reliability + online growth, raw bandwidth is secondary.
>
> - Walter
>   
AFAIK Nexenta is the whole OpenSolaris Kernel with the Ubuntu userland
on top. It sounds pretty sounds good and I'm thinking about using it in
an upcoming project primarily to get my hands on ZFS. I'm not sure
OpenSolaris (or its ZFS) is as robust as Solaris proper though ~ I guess
the proof will be in the pudding! Anyone been using this?

PS: A Terrabyte is a shade over 50 quid these days and even the 5400 RPM
ones have an average transfer rate of 75Mb/sec - happy days!

Roger.
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