On Tue Dec 18, 2007 at 12:29:27PM -0500, Norman Elton wrote:

We're investigating the possibility of running Linux (RHEL) on top of Sun's 
X4500 Thumper box:

http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/

Basically, it's a server with 48 SATA hard drives. No hardware RAID. It's 
designed for Sun's ZFS filesystem.

So... we're curious how Linux will handle such a beast. Has anyone run MD 
software RAID over so many disks? Then piled LVM/ext3 on top of that? Any 
suggestions?

Are we crazy to think this is even possible?

The most I've done is 28 drives in RAID-10 (SCSI drives, with the array
formatted as XFS).  That keeps failing one drive, but I've not had time
to give the drive a full test yet to confirm it's a drive issue.  It's
been running quite happily (under pretty heavy database load) on 27
disks for a couple of months now though.

Cheers,
        Robin
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