Hardware Recommendations?

[1parkplace]

Hey Guys,

I see a lot of people post their specs on these forums and a lot of good performance numbers coming from some of them.

I'm interested in building a homegrown machine, preferably 12+ hot swap SAS drive bays.

Anyone have any hardware recommendations? (ie. RAID Controllers, Mainboards, Drives, Chassis) I'm looking for good DSS hardware support, not really interested in experimental hardware.

I will be using Intel 10GbE NICs to connect this new Storage to my existing storage network.

If you have benchmarks to back up the numbers that would be great.

Thanks for your input!

Drew

[rogerk]

Hi,

we have build our system in april-may.
Hardware is redundant:
Mainboard Supermicro X8DT3
Chasis SC836
CPU 1xIntel Xeon 5550W
RAM 24GB (6x4GB)
Raid Controller Adaptec ICP Vortex 8165BR with BB 256 Cache
HDD 16x Western Digital 1TB Raid Edition 3
NIC Intel 10gbe CX4 Dual Port

Switch
2x HP 6400cl CX4

we have 2 Citrix XEN Server as "Client"
Hardware 2xIntel Xeon 5550W with 32GB RAM and Intel 10gbe CX4 Dual

Performance Windows 2008

with write cache on: ca 90000 io/s
with write cache off: ca 25000 io/s

Performance with Citrix XEN (windows 2008 guest):

with write cache on: ca 66000 io/s
with write cache off: ca 15000 io/s

there was no differenz between raid 10 and raid 6 !

so we use raid 6 iscsi for our production system.

the perfomance measure was taken with sqlio and the folowing parameters

sqlio -kW -s60 -frandom -o64 -b4 -BH -LS -Fparam.txt
d:\testfile.dat 2 0x0 10

for xen we make some special config.

we also tested dss with 2x Xeon X550w and 48GB RAM , but the system seems to be slower with that config.


so i hope this will help you.

regards
roger

[1parkplace]

Thank you, I will investigate the cost of this setup,

Which SuperMicro board did you get exactly? I see there are many models, X8DT3, X8DT3-O, X8DT3-F-O, X8DT3-F???

[1parkplace]

Also roger, I was not able to find the Adaptec 8165BR, did you mean the 5165BR? http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support...aid/ICP5165BR/

[rogerk]

hi drew,

you are right. i mean the 5165br and the board is the x8dt3.

[Robotbeat]

rogerk, what sort of performance have you been getting with larger test file sizes? Like, twice or thrice as big as your ram?