AxelMertes
Technical User
Hi!
I am currently investigating the alternatives for installing a new 8+ TB RAID secured storage solution for our new video workstations. The system will work in uncompressed HDTV video modes, eating ~250 MB/s per system at peak (dual stream realtime), 125 MB/s on average. A total of 3 such systems plus access from a rendering farm of 40 CPUs will be there. We expect an minimum needed bandwidth of 500 MB/s at least to work fluently.
Current options are e.g. striping two dual-active-active SATA-to-FC RAIDs such as from Infortrend, utilizing 32 SATA drives such as the 250 GB Maxtor, and up to 4 2GBit FC ports. Each enclosure is just 4 HE in size. The expected bandwith is about 150 MB/s per active controller, meaning up to 600 MB/s with 4 controllers. Price for such installation is about 25,000 Euros for 8 TB storage, 6 TB net RAID5 disk space. We have already Gadzoox 2 GBit switches. This stuff is available now.
Another option would be the upcoming Medea StreamRAID48, that will utilize 48 SATA drives in incredible 4 HE rack space, including a 16 port 2 GBit switch, dual-active-active controllers and 8 RAID sets of 5+1 disks. That will give us incredible 15 TB/12 TB net in 4 HE! But they are still working on the release and its to be expected to market in 2. quarter 2004. For now just the smaller 3 HE 12 drive model is available for OEMs.
Another option now opens on the horizon and thats why I am asking in this forum:
We could buy one or two used but almost new Symmetrix 3930 with 9.2 TB and 12+ GB cache each. I knew these monsters just from exhibitions and main frames, but never actually used them. I read lot about its famous features, but when you look close you find its usually off-the-shelf hardware components put together to build these devices PLUS advanced software I don´t really need or can not utilize in my application. But, given the idea of having a comparison of 256 times 32GB disk vs. 32 times 250GB disks, the Symmetrix should be really fast.
If you consider my application as just wanting ONE large single Windows NTFS partition with maximum disk space (6+ TB net) how complex is the setup of the Symmetrix 3930 then? We may do software striping of smaller than 2 TB sized slices if necessary - some controllers have addressing problems beyond 2 TB LUNs. I don´t need all these advanced mainframe software / caching stuff. I just need pure disk space and pure non-cached sustained disk performance of large block sequential data - usually the opposite of data base users.
All info I found so far is that it has two cache buses with 360 MB/s each. But is that per channel director, or disk director? Or is that total bandwidth at max peak?
If I consider that the whole system will be used as ONE large disk array (shared storage for HDTV content) I expect some 200 disks working at once when reading / writing data. Given the idea that at least 10 MB/s come in/out each disk as a very minimum expectation, this should yield into 2 GByte/s transfer speeds easily. But where is the real bottleneck in these systems? Feeding the speed out using only 1 GBit connections could be a bottleneck.
Has anyone ever tested the total sustained bandwidth of such systems as the Symmetrix 3930? Think of four host computers with dual 2 GBit HBAs each, reading sequencial data and maximum disk speed, how much megabytes per second will I see? 300, 600, 800?
Is the disk director principle in the 3930 comparable to what DataDirect does with their 8000 and 8500 models? They can feed up to 800+ MB/s sustained from 56 disks minimum.
Does the 3930 use FC or SCSI disks? What brand is the RAID controller? The ED-1032 within is a brocade as far as I know these devices, right?
You see, I have a lot of questions, but I guess not many customers in my business ever worked or thought about such systems as the Symmetrix 3930. So I just ask here, as I can see some people do know the 3930 for real.
I would be very pleased if someone around could give me some hints and answers.
Btw, I have an offer for the 3930 that is close to the SATA RAID stuff - now you may understand why I think about this. I know that power consumption and space is much less for the SATA stuff, but its definetly slow drives compared to the 3930. I just want to make a right decision and don´t want to buy the wrong thing.
Best regards,
Axel Mertes
I am currently investigating the alternatives for installing a new 8+ TB RAID secured storage solution for our new video workstations. The system will work in uncompressed HDTV video modes, eating ~250 MB/s per system at peak (dual stream realtime), 125 MB/s on average. A total of 3 such systems plus access from a rendering farm of 40 CPUs will be there. We expect an minimum needed bandwidth of 500 MB/s at least to work fluently.
Current options are e.g. striping two dual-active-active SATA-to-FC RAIDs such as from Infortrend, utilizing 32 SATA drives such as the 250 GB Maxtor, and up to 4 2GBit FC ports. Each enclosure is just 4 HE in size. The expected bandwith is about 150 MB/s per active controller, meaning up to 600 MB/s with 4 controllers. Price for such installation is about 25,000 Euros for 8 TB storage, 6 TB net RAID5 disk space. We have already Gadzoox 2 GBit switches. This stuff is available now.
Another option would be the upcoming Medea StreamRAID48, that will utilize 48 SATA drives in incredible 4 HE rack space, including a 16 port 2 GBit switch, dual-active-active controllers and 8 RAID sets of 5+1 disks. That will give us incredible 15 TB/12 TB net in 4 HE! But they are still working on the release and its to be expected to market in 2. quarter 2004. For now just the smaller 3 HE 12 drive model is available for OEMs.
Another option now opens on the horizon and thats why I am asking in this forum:
We could buy one or two used but almost new Symmetrix 3930 with 9.2 TB and 12+ GB cache each. I knew these monsters just from exhibitions and main frames, but never actually used them. I read lot about its famous features, but when you look close you find its usually off-the-shelf hardware components put together to build these devices PLUS advanced software I don´t really need or can not utilize in my application. But, given the idea of having a comparison of 256 times 32GB disk vs. 32 times 250GB disks, the Symmetrix should be really fast.
If you consider my application as just wanting ONE large single Windows NTFS partition with maximum disk space (6+ TB net) how complex is the setup of the Symmetrix 3930 then? We may do software striping of smaller than 2 TB sized slices if necessary - some controllers have addressing problems beyond 2 TB LUNs. I don´t need all these advanced mainframe software / caching stuff. I just need pure disk space and pure non-cached sustained disk performance of large block sequential data - usually the opposite of data base users.
All info I found so far is that it has two cache buses with 360 MB/s each. But is that per channel director, or disk director? Or is that total bandwidth at max peak?
If I consider that the whole system will be used as ONE large disk array (shared storage for HDTV content) I expect some 200 disks working at once when reading / writing data. Given the idea that at least 10 MB/s come in/out each disk as a very minimum expectation, this should yield into 2 GByte/s transfer speeds easily. But where is the real bottleneck in these systems? Feeding the speed out using only 1 GBit connections could be a bottleneck.
Has anyone ever tested the total sustained bandwidth of such systems as the Symmetrix 3930? Think of four host computers with dual 2 GBit HBAs each, reading sequencial data and maximum disk speed, how much megabytes per second will I see? 300, 600, 800?
Is the disk director principle in the 3930 comparable to what DataDirect does with their 8000 and 8500 models? They can feed up to 800+ MB/s sustained from 56 disks minimum.
Does the 3930 use FC or SCSI disks? What brand is the RAID controller? The ED-1032 within is a brocade as far as I know these devices, right?
You see, I have a lot of questions, but I guess not many customers in my business ever worked or thought about such systems as the Symmetrix 3930. So I just ask here, as I can see some people do know the 3930 for real.
I would be very pleased if someone around could give me some hints and answers.
Btw, I have an offer for the 3930 that is close to the SATA RAID stuff - now you may understand why I think about this. I know that power consumption and space is much less for the SATA stuff, but its definetly slow drives compared to the 3930. I just want to make a right decision and don´t want to buy the wrong thing.
Best regards,
Axel Mertes