Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1695 mails)

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 08:42 -0700, Lew Wolfgang wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> I've been working on a project for several years now that requires
> lots of disk space.  We've got three servers, each with 40 directly
> connected 1-TB SATA disks.
> Now, the project is expanding and will require as many as 98 directly
> connected disks.  I know that I can get the hardware and RAID (JBOD)
> controllers to mechanize this, but I'm not sure about the OS.
> How many individual disk (/dev/sdxx) drives can Linux support?

Last number I saw was 2,304.  But I think that kind of architecture
(and even your number) is unmanageable/unsustainable.  Your going to
need some high-end controllers to get near that number.

> BTW, we need directly connected disks because of the bandwidth limits
> that NFS throws up.  I'd be happy to listen to alternatives.

Fiber channel?  Although I really suspect that if you tested iSCSI you'd
find the bandwidth sufficient (I've just heard the
cannot-do-it-due-to-bandwidth allot and found it to be very rarely
true).

There is really no way to introduce HSM (hierarchical storage
management) into your app?  If the answer is no, I don't mean to be
harsh, but your application is effectively broken (it certainly will
stop eventually).  Maybe use DASD for recent/active data-sets and
migrate less active data-sets to iSCSI attached storage?

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