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Grex > Coop13 > #380: Cyberspace Communications finances for November 2006 | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 124 responses total. |
maus
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response 41 of 124:
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Dec 16 20:40 UTC 2006 |
Re resp:38
That is totally inappropriate and a waste of time to look up. We could
not afford it and do not need it, so in short the answer to your
question is "eat me!".
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nharmon
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response 42 of 124:
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Dec 16 22:50 UTC 2006 |
re 41: You're pretty quick to flame people who use emoticons to express
their sarcasm.
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nharmon
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response 43 of 124:
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Dec 16 22:56 UTC 2006 |
And why would you mirror two of the drives and leave two as hot spares?
With that same hardware you could set up a RAID 5 array with three of
the drives and still have a hot spare. With RAID 5 you would have double
the amount of space versus what you proposed.
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maus
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response 44 of 124:
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Dec 16 23:09 UTC 2006 |
Sorry, you're fair. Looking back, my mind skipped over the smile, so I
completely missed the humor. I apologize for my unkind response.
The reason for my proposed setup is several-fold:
- Grex server is maintained by volunteers, and they may not be able to
do a truck-roll when the first drive fails, and this setup allows time
to respond or even save up for the beginning of the month before the
array is even considered degraded
- The design as I spec'ed it would nearly quadruple the available
space. In my (not humble) oppinion, this would last a substantial amount
of time
- RAID-5 (striping with distributed parity, single-drive redundancy) is
expensive in terms of both read and write access times. With the large
number of files, especially the large number of small files that Grex
server accretes, this could translate into an io bottleneck during times
of heavy load. If we need more space than I proposed, I would recommend
that we get larger drives or set up a RAID 1 + 0 (a stripe of mirror
sets).
I will say that my suggestion to use two hot spares may be overly
cautious, and that we could step down to one hot spare without serious
risk to the system. If we are seriously concerned about availability, I
would recommend the two hot spares, and step from one 4-port RAID board
to a pair of 2-port boards (preferably on seperate busses) so that even
if a board fails, the array is still being managed.
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cross
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response 45 of 124:
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Dec 17 03:52 UTC 2006 |
I like that configuration; Maus, do you have an offhand idea of how
much it would cost?
Regarding RAID-5: part of the idea of a hardware RAID controller is
that it handles all of that by itself and thus is ``fast.'' I concur
it won't be as fast as simple mirror (due to the parity calculations
being spread across drives), but that should be masked somewhat by
the controller.
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maus
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response 46 of 124:
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Dec 17 04:23 UTC 2006 |
If Aruba gives it green light, I will call around to vendors I know and
ask for an estimate.
Regarding RAID-5, the work of making the parity comparisons on every
read and write is offloaded, so it is less work for the host's
processor, but still it is not fast, and in our case, probably not
needed.
One small nitpick, it's maus, not Maus.
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cross
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response 47 of 124:
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Dec 17 04:41 UTC 2006 |
Sorry!
I agree that RAID-5 is not needed, but I'm surprised the controller doesn't
do a faster job of it.
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nharmon
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response 48 of 124:
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Dec 17 14:34 UTC 2006 |
Most controllers do, but my experience is limited to Adaptec SCSI
controllers. We use RAID 5 on systems that are very disk intensive with
no noticeable delays. But RAID 1 will work.
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aruba
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response 49 of 124:
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Dec 17 15:06 UTC 2006 |
I asked the staff to look in on this item to give an opinion on maus's
proposed setup. I don't have the technical expertise to say how elaborate
a system Grex could use.
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maus
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response 50 of 124:
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Dec 17 16:58 UTC 2006 |
Aruba, thanks for sending this to them, and for your confidence in my
solution. If they like it, I'll start gathering quotes from places like
Altex, Cyberguys and a couple of others (I don't have my catalogs with
me at work, so I can't remember the names of the other good vendors).
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maus
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response 51 of 124:
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Dec 17 17:02 UTC 2006 |
Cross and Nharmon,
About RAID 5 performance, I may be mistaken. I regularly work with the 2
port RAID boards for simple mirror sets (pretty much every day), but
have not used a RAID 5 array since back in the day of the Escalade 7000
series (IDE), and I hope that write performance has improved
substantially since then. What I typically do for size+redundancy is two
drives per controller as a mirror set, and then either make a stripe of
the mirror sets or concatenate them using LVM in RHEL or ccd in OpenBSD.
There may be better solutions, this is just how we've been doing it
here. I appreciate what I can learn from each of you guys.
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nharmon
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response 52 of 124:
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Dec 17 17:55 UTC 2006 |
I have never implemented RAID 5 with SATA, only mirroring like maus
described. However, my experience with SCSI RAID 5 is that it performs
well when the number of drives in the array are low (say, 3-8 drives).
When our needs exceeded that, we've implemented RAID 50, which is
striping across multiple RAID 5 arrays. Most RAID controllers aren't
capable of this, and the ones that are cost too much for Grex.
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maus
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response 53 of 124:
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Dec 17 21:00 UTC 2006 |
Sorry for the dumb question, but what is "Silly Hat Fund"?
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aruba
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response 54 of 124:
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Dec 17 22:56 UTC 2006 |
At a board meeting long ago, there was a discussion of fundraising, and
whether we should collect money for particular goals (like buying a hard
drive, for instance) or just put everything in the general fund. Having
concrete goals sometimes helps to get donation, but, someone pointed out,
it's important to have money that as available to be spent on anything,
"even silly hats". So we agreed to set up funds and raise money for them
as appropriate, but keep most of our money in the general fund.
After the meeting, Peter Riley (nestene) gave me $5 and said, "This is
for the Silly Hat Fund". So I dutifully created said partition of Grex's
money, and it has been on the treasurer's report ever since. Lots of
people have donated to it over the years, and occasionally when the Grex
walkers accumulated a little more cash than necessary to pay our lunch
tab, the excess has gone into the Silly Hat Fund.
No one's come up with a good use for it, yet. Whatever we spend it on, it
should be something frivolous.
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steve
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response 55 of 124:
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Dec 18 05:12 UTC 2006 |
Back when we were looking at new hardware for Grex, the goal was to
get as good a set of hardware for as little money as we could do. Had
we had infiniate money I'd have likely gotten different things. The
Antec tower and PS are known for their reliability; since we wern't in
a rackmount situation we could avoid possible heat problems by having
a large case, and also we could stuff a lot of disks in that case.
I didn't get ECC memory because the last memory failure I have seen
on any machine I've worked on was in 1999.
I've been dealing with raid stuff at work and have gotten an
ARCO ide raid 1 card. This is a hardware raid system: its invisable
to the operating system, appearing as a single IDE disk which
connects to the IDE controller. This kind of raid card gets
completely around drivers, etc. I would think thats the way to go
for Grex. The simpler we can make things the better off we are.
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steve
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response 56 of 124:
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Dec 18 05:15 UTC 2006 |
One thing to remember about Grex is that having multiple spindles
running is a good thing. A huge raid 5 array could hold everything,
but at the cost of losing multiple disks. I'm not sure what the
best tradeoff is now, but I suspect SATA disks are the way to go,
since they're working out well in terms of reliability, and are
fast.
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maus
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response 57 of 124:
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Dec 19 16:24 UTC 2006 |
This is not an official quote, just a first approximation based on
prices listed on one vendor's web-page. I figure it should at least give
us an order of magnitude approximation that we can use for sanity
checks. Substituting Maxtor drives instead of Seagate would change the
grand total by less than 10$ and neither brand seems to be sold out at
any of the vendors I've dealt with, so the brand of drives comes down to
preferences of staff.
PROVANTAGE:
1x 3ware 9550SX-4 - 4-pt PCI-X Low-profile SATA II RAID Card with Cables
1x RDC-400 SATA RAID Drive Cage
4x Barracuda ES 250GB SATA NL35 7200RPM 16MB Cache 3Gb/s 8.5ms
US$ Subtotal: $ 827.70
==========================
The vendors I will be contacting are (provided board and staff want me
to go ahead and get bids):
Provantage
synnex.com
Bell Micro
CyberGuys
Altex
The Delcom Group
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maus
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response 58 of 124:
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Dec 19 16:31 UTC 2006 |
After more reading, it appears that the hit we would take on computing
parity and writing parity would be offset by parallelizing seeking. Does
anyone have numbers for this? Is a RAID 5 with one hot spare
sufficiently reliable for us?
Also, I realized I made a big assumption. Does our chassis have physical
space for a drive cage that is the height of 3 CDRom drives and 5.25"
wide?
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maus
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response 59 of 124:
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Dec 19 16:40 UTC 2006 |
Just wondering, since this has a decidedly technical side to it and is a
discussion of hardware for Grexserver, should this item be moved/linked
into Agorage conference?
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remmers
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response 60 of 124:
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Dec 19 17:17 UTC 2006 |
Probably the Garage conference, which is specifically for public
discussions of Grex technical issues. I think the fairwitness there
is janc, so he'd be the person to link it.
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maus
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response 61 of 124:
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Dec 19 17:25 UTC 2006 |
I have a rough draft of the RFQ ready for staff and board to look over.
It has a couple of spaces that need to be filled in (the contact person
and the due date). Comments, criticisms, thoughts, etc are encouraged.
=========================================================================
=
Introduction:
Cyberspace Communications, Inc. (Grex) is a nonprofit organization
dedicated to the advancement of public education and scientific endeavor
through interaction with computers, and humans via computers, using
computer conferencing. Further purposes include the exchange of
scientific and technical information about the various aspects of
computer science, such as operating systems, computer networks, and
computer programming. Cyberspace Communications is investigating
increasing their conferencing server's capacity, capabilities and
reliability by adding a new drive array.
Instructions:
Please provide an anticipated and a maximum quote. Specifications are
firm, and bidders are not to deviate from the specification without
prior written approval from Cyberspace Communications. Quantities are
firm. No under-runs. Cyberspace Communications will retain units over
the specified quantity and will not pay for over-runs.
Award Criteria:
Consideration will be given to price, warranty terms, responsibility,
delivery time, delivery terms and experience in performance of similar
deals.
Contact For Specification:
********@cyberspace.org
Alternates/Substitutes:
Alternate bids of substantially the same quality, style and features are
invited. In order to receive full consideration, such alternate bids
must be accompanied by sufficient descriptive literature and/or
specifications to clearly identify the offer and allow for a complete
evaluation.
Acceptance of Bids:
Any bid may be rejected as non-responsive in the judgment of Cyberspace
Communications should any of the following occur: Material alteration or
erasure of the RFP/RFQ documents; Failure to submit required bid
guaranty (when required); Failure to furnish requested pricing or other
information; Submission of a late bid. In addition, bids may be rejected
for any other justifiable reason including, but not limited to, failure
to perform on previous contracts with Cyberspace Communications.
Withdrawl of Bids:
Bids may be withdrawn or modified upon written request from the properly
identified bidder, prior to the date and hour scheduled for the closing
of bids.
Receipt of Quotes:
Responses to this RFQ should be emailed to ********@cyberspace.org by
********** at noon, Eastern Time.
Item Quantity Description
0 1 3Ware 9550SX-4LP: PCI-X 4 port Serial ATA RAID
controller board 1 1 3Ware RDC-400: Serial ATA RAID
Drive Cage 2 4 Seagate Barracuda ES 200 GByte Serial
ATA Drives
*OR*
2 4 Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 200 GByte Serial ATA Drives
3 4 3Ware Cables for 9590SE, 9550SX and 3ware
Sidecar
Earliest Delivery Date (after receipt of order): ____________________
Shipping Charges: INCLUDED_______EXTRA_______ COST________
Method of Shipping: _________________________________________________
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mcnally
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response 62 of 124:
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Dec 19 18:16 UTC 2006 |
Is the "SATA RAID Drive Cage" an external SATA enclosure, or does
"drive cage" in this parlance mean a sled that fits into another
enclosure? In other words, will these drives be in a separate
box or inside the main system unit? Either way, what other cabling
is necessary?
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maus
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response 63 of 124:
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Dec 19 18:58 UTC 2006 |
It is a metal box that sits inside the front of the server chassis, in
the same place where one would normally put internal CDRom drives or
tape drives. It has four slots in it, and you slide the drives (on
trays) into those slots. You can see hte photograph for it at
http://3ware.com/products/ata.asp.
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mary
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response 64 of 124:
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Dec 19 20:53 UTC 2006 |
Do we want to invest any money in non-rack mounted hardware?
If we ever wanted to move to another location we'd pretty much
need to fit in standard rack space.
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nharmon
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response 65 of 124:
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Dec 19 21:28 UTC 2006 |
This is an internal drive array, Mary.
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