What Hardware to Design New XSan from Scratch?

[JesusAli]

Hey Everybody!

After I just spent all summer learning and implementing an XSan with:
2 Qlogic 5200 Fiber Channel Switches
1 G5 XServe MDC
1 G5 Power Mac Standby MDC
3 XServe 14 Disk RAIDs

My school now wants to repurpose all that hardware and buy everything NEW for the XSan!

I just realized that all summer I was able to avoid having to learn anything about the Promise Hardware.

It would be totally RAD if any of you could take the time to post a hardware list of how to build a 4GB XSan from scratch. What are the best hardware choices? What Ethernet Switches do you recommend?

Our setup will seek to serve 12 Dual 2Ghz G5 stations working primarily with 2-3 layers of SD video each. And 3 Mac Pros, 1 Capturing ProRes 422 HQ, and two others each editing 2-3 layers of Pro Res 422 HQ.

Ideally, we would like all of this to be going on simultaneously, without hiccups.

I have some VTrak questions that I will post in that forum. Any links to a VTrak "primer" would be appreciated. I just downloaded the PDF Quick Start Guide and it was helpful, but I still have questions.

Thanks again to anyone willing to post a list of recommend hardware!

[Guru Evi]

Since your school doesn't mind splurging a bit - this is what Apple recently recommended to me (contact Apple themselves, they have really great people for education that are able to draw out detailed overviews and give you great discounts).

2 XServe 8-core Nehalem as MDC with 4x4Gb FC HBA in each machine
If you need more than 1Gbps on the Ethernet side consider investing in a 4-port Ethernet card as well.

1x Promise VTrak system (16TB) - you can switch those to 15k SAS for more speed but less storage
1x Promise VTrak expansion system (16TB)

4Gbit FC switch according to your FC network size.
Decent GigE switches according to your Ethernet size (a good Cisco or HP will do)

According to my resource at Apple the VTrak has most speed when combined with 1 expansion system and unless you have a really good Ethernet switch (like a 2960) you should consider splitting up your internal metadata network from your public ethernet.

[abstractrude]

I dont really agree with guru about using SAS drives for your workflow. You will want more spindles not faster spindles. I'm currently a big fan of the 3 vtrak setup.

1E+1J (4LUNS of 7 disk RAID5) =26 TB

A third VTRAK for your metadata. I have also recently started toying with striping metadata across two LUNS. Truth is, you already have Xserve RAID and that would probably work just fine for metadata. You can also configure your 2 Promise units with 6 disk RAID 5's and in the E unit make a 2 disk raid 1 for your metadata, with 2 more spares. The only problem is you get 6 global spares here, which I think is a waste.

On the metadata unit you might be smart to do SAS drives, I have seen better performance with the SAS drives but since your doing a 100% video workflow standard SATA drives are just fine.

About the ethernet switch apple well tell you need a "dumb" switch thats separated. You need low latency between clients and controllers, thats all that matters. There are plenty of people using VLANS and all sorts of strange ether configs for metadata. Low latency = Fast XSAN. you def need a dedicated network for metadata. If that is at layer 1 or 2 I don't see a difference. Latency is key here. do you have a budget. Maybe we can build your SAN around that.

Oh as for fibre switching go with the Qlogic stuff, its rock solid.

[mark raudonis]

Check out the "Active Storage" products. (New forum just started on this site)

http://www.xsanity.com/article.php/20090418214945743


mark