Binary Brew

Here is how I envision the Thumper NFS cluster…. I drew this up real quick, for some reason the visual representations of physical disk layouts make much more sense to me.   This configuration would give 4GB into the NFS cluster and the NFS cluster would have 8GB of connectivity to the Thumpers.  With both Thumpers presenting raidz2 pools with 2 spares and the NFS cluster creating one large raidz2 pool from the 8 iSCSI devices presented from the Thumpers, there should be a great level of redundancy in this configuration.

I just installed a Thumper, a Sun x4500 last week. Aside from the hours it took to install from a virtual CD using the iLOM interface, it took about 30 minutes to configure 32TB of usable storage in a RAID2Z configuration with 4 parity groups. In that thirty minutes I was also able to build a filesystem from the pool with 5TB reserved and exported for NFS use and compression enabled.

There are several blogs out there that I referred to when configuring this beast and that helped immensely in planning the deployment of this box. Next week, after my vacation, I plan on installing SAMBA/CIFS and seeing if I can make this 48k$ 48TB Raw ( thats 1$ a GB ) out perform the several NetApps that we use. I have trunked the 4 copper GB interfaces using dladm and LACP so we should be able to see some incredible performance out of this machine.