Thread: Any experience with Drobo SAN and PG?
I'm looking to spec a new production server for a small client and have been looking at the Drobo SAN units. Has anybody run PG on one of these yet? It looks like only the B1200i supports Linux operating systems.
On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Michael Nolan <htfoot@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm looking to spec a new production server for a small client and
have been looking at the Drobo SAN units.
One of my engineers and I did a lot of investigation into SAN units. The one that came up to the top for us was the Synology. That was for home use, but reliability was tops on the list. The Drobo uses some proprietary technology for their RAID. Hard to tell how that will hold up over time. There are also many reports of reliability problems with them -- failing after a year or so.
What advantage are you seeking with a SAN vs internal drives vs external RAID array? I personally use the latter for my production servers.
On 12/19/2012 5:29 AM, Vick Khera wrote: > The Drobo uses some proprietary technology for their RAID. its not really proprietary, and its not really raid. its file replication. totally doesn't work for random write type applications like databases. for my HOME storage, I picked up a HP Microserver N40L last month on a 'black friday' sale, put 8GB ram in it, and FreeNAS on a USB stick (there's an internal USB slot perfect for this) and populated it with 4 x 3TB drives (Seagate ST3000DM001's I pulled from $99 USB drives, also on a black friday sale). I've got it formatted as RaidZ (ZFS's equivalent of raid5) and have no problem hitting 80MB/second over gigE with SMB. Now, I've not yet tested iscsi on it. Pros: inexpensive, flexible, robust, compact, low power (about 50 watts average running). ECC memory. adequate dual core CPU (AMD Neo 1.5GHz). Cons: 4 drives is what you get, unless you add a PCI-E card and an external chassis. 8gb max supported ram (although folks say certainl 2x8gb combinations work). only 1 gigE port unless you add a PCI-E card. only holds 2 PCI-E low profile half length cards.
On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 3:14 PM, John R Pierce <pierce@hogranch.com> wrote:
I've got it formatted as RaidZ (ZFS's equivalent of raid5) and have no problem hitting 80MB/second over gigE with SMB. Now, I've not yet tested iscsi on it.
I'm interested to know how heavy ZFS usage holds up with only 8GB of kernel memory. Is FreeNAS up to kernel 9.x yet? I haven't followed FreeNAS for a while. My smallest RAM machine with ZFS has 16GB.... and I am *loving* it. I wish it was easier to make it the boot default file system too!
On 12/20/2012 5:56 AM, Vick Khera wrote: > > I'm interested to know how heavy ZFS usage holds up with only 8GB of > kernel memory. Is FreeNAS up to kernel 9.x yet? I haven't followed > FreeNAS for a while. My smallest RAM machine with ZFS has 16GB.... > and I am *loving* it. I wish it was easier to make it the boot default > file system too! its currently FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p4, and my home (1-2 desktops, 2-3 laptops, a tablet and a couple android phones, and a A/V system playing video) hardly counts as heavy use. there's rarely more than a couple files being read/written at the same time.
On 2012-12-17, Michael Nolan <htfoot@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm looking to spec a new production server for a small client and > have been looking at the Drobo SAN units. > > Has anybody run PG on one of these yet? Drobo has, some of them run postgresql internally. -- ⚂⚃ 100% natural