[illumos-Discuss] CPU/Chipset architecture for high performance ZFS servers

[Alasdair Lumsden]

Hi Garrett,

On 01/04/2011 15:25, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> We have had good results with Intel kit, and they're friendly to Nexenta
> and illumos so I prefer to reward that. :-) Your RAM sizes are good,
> possibly even overkill, as long as you are not using dedup.

That sounds like a good reason to go Intel :-)

> More cores is better... what protocols would you be using (NFS? iSCSI?
> FCoE?)

Either iSCSI over 10GigE, or FC target.

We'd love to be able to propose FCoE to the end client, but I don't 
think commercial Nexenta supports it? If it does, then FCoE + CNAs + 
Brocade VDX would be the way to go.

We want to use a "storage fabric" to scale this out as the end client 
will want to incrementally add servers and storage over time, which 
could end up in different physical racks, which limits us to switches 
that support eg. TRILL.

We're hoping the client will seriously consider iSCSI over 10GigE + 
Nexenta. But iSCSI can set off the alarm bells with some clients, and so 
we don't lose this pitch, we're also going to price up and propose an 
FCoE solution with a different storage vendor. But our 
recommendation/preference will be Nexenta.

> I can put in touch with one of our sales/field engineers who is *very*
> good and has a great deal of experience configuring these things. He can
> help you spec out the kit that will perform best for your application.

Thanks again!

Cheers,

Alasdair