[Lustre-discuss] HW experience

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

Hi Martin,

On Wednesday 26 March 2008 04:53:31 Martin Gasthuber wrote:
>   we would like to establish a small Lustre instance and for the OST
> planning to use standard Dell PE1950 servers (2x QuadCore + 16 GB Ram)
> and for the disk a JBOD (MD1000) steered by the PE1950 internal Raid
> controller (Raid-6). Any experience (good or bad) with such a config ?

I also have a 50TB Lustre setup based on this hardware: 8 PE1950 OSSes 
connected to two MD1000 OSTes each. The MDS uses a MD3000 as a MDT for 
high-availability (redundancy is not currently in use, though, I never 
managed to get it working reliably).

Can't say much about the PERC6 controller, since I'm using its older 
brother PERC5, but memory wise, you should be good with 16B. We planned 
4GB per OSS (2xOST each) at the beginning, but we had to double that to 
avoid memory exhaustion [1]. It will depend on the load induced by the 
clients, though.

MD1000s' performance is great as long as you set the read-ahead settings as 
Aaron mentioned.

/scratch $ iozone -c -c -R -b ~/iozone.xls -C -r 64k -s 24m -i 0 -i 1 -i 
2 -i8 -t50   
"Throughput report Y-axis is type of test X-axis is number of processes"
"Record size = 64 Kbytes "
"Output is in Kbytes/sec"

"  Initial write " 1317906.72
"        Rewrite " 2423618.81
"           Read " 3484409.47
"        Re-read " 4023550.60
"    Random read " 3361937.08
" Mixed workload " 2994666.57
"   Random write " 1777569.04


[1]http://lists.lustre.org/pipermail/lustre-discuss/2008-February/004874.html

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian