On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Neil Brown wrote:

On Tuesday December 18, normelton@gmail.com wrote:

quoted

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?

There are those that have run Linux MD RAID on thumpers before. I vaguely 
recall some driver issues (unrelated to MD) that made it less suitable 
than solaris, but that might be fixed in recent kernels.

Alternately, 8 6drive RAID5s or 6 8raid RAID6s, and use RAID0 to
combine them together.  This would give you adequate reliability and
performance and still a large amount of storage space.

My personal suggestion would be 5 9-disk raid6s, one raid1 root mirror and 
one hot spare. Then raid0, lvm, or separate filesystem on those 5 raidsets 
for data, depending on your needs.

You get almost as much data space as with the 6 8-disk raid6s, and have a 
separate pair of disks for all the small updates (logging, metadata, etc), 
so this makes alot of sense if most of the data is bulk file access.

/Mattias Wadenstein