Mattias Wadenstein wrote:

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007, Neil Brown wrote:

quoted

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.

quoted

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.

Other than thinking raid-10 better than  raid-1for performance, I like it.

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.

-- 
Bill Davidsen [off-list ref]
  "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
  be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark