[Scottish] Testing AoE gear

[Colin McKinnon]

On Tuesday 28 August 2007 16:31, Phillip Bennett wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> A while ago I was talking about upgrading some storage and RAID and such...
> I've been looking into the Coraid AoE solution (www.coraid.com) and have
> managed to get a test unit so I can evaluate it for a couple of weeks. 
> It's the 1521.
>
> What I wanted to know was, does anyone have any guidelines for testing? 
> I'm sure I could think of some tests for this box, but if people have any
> ideas or scripts to test bandwidth, latency and speed etc, that would be a
> huge help!

I guess it should be fairly straightforward -
1) does it work with Linux
2) when you run in hardware RAID mode can you see events below the level of 
the 'phyiscal' volume (e.g. if a drive in a stripe set fails)
3) ....for anything else....bonnie (try google for a URL)

> This box will have two possible uses.  The first is as primary backup
> instead of tape (Basically running a full backup to both tape and disk
> weely, then running incrimentals every day to disk) or possibly to upgrade
> from our 2x PowerVault 220S.  The PV220S isn't sold anymore, so we'd either
> have to do this, or move to the MD1000 from Dell.  Both use SATA disks, but
> the Dell uses a SCSI interface to the server where the Coraid uses AoE.

? last sentence didn't make a lot of sense to me - but I have just got home 
from the pub.

> Personally, I don't see a huge difference, apart from the fact that I could
> turn the AoE into a SAN and mount GFS partitions from various servers for
> faster (concurrent) access.  Would anyone see a problem with a setup like
> that?  Or have I got the wrong idea?
>

Sounds cool, but I would expect that a (non-parallel) concurrent filesystem 
would, on the whole not performa as well as a single box filesystem; IIRC GFS 
has distributed locking but not full metadata management. It kinda depends 
how your data works, but you might be better off with a full PC running as an 
intermezzo/coda/afs server or just mirroring to a NBD over gigabit Ethernet.

Suck it and see - and do let us know how you get on.

C.