Storage Area Network as a tlug meeting topic

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 6:29 PM, William Muriithi
<william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>  I am wondering if anyone among us have been lucky to work extensively
> with SAN and would be willing to share the knowledge. I think we could
> all gain by exchanging experience on the subject, for example on:
>
> - Good practical reference we have come across -  be either books or web links.
> -  Share experience on hardware performance, especially when using
> multipathd and Linux in general. Yeah, I could get that information
> from the white page, but I will be frank and say I do not trust
> marketing department.
> -  Any interesting way of gaining experience on the subject without
> parting with thousands of dollars.

Sounds interesting...

The one challenge I'd foresee is that there are two perspectives on
this that are quite different in their slants:

a) Those that are doing "hard-core" SAN work, where maximizing numbers
of spindles is worth paying extra money, and where multichannel
FibreChannel is worthwhile.

I saw the following recently that explains that (though doesn't
particulary explain *why*) expensive disks can give 10x better
performance than the cheaper disks.

http://www.dbms2.com/2009/04/28/data-warehouse-storage-options-cheap-expensive-or-solid-state-disk-drives/

In this world, spending an extra $100K to get better performance isn't
"out there."

But then there's...

b) Those of us that would like to hook up a bunch of cheap storage.

Thus, 'What are the sorts of "Sweet Points" where you get the "mostest
for the leastest", where spending more on it *wouldn't* give you extra
value?"

Both ends are interesting, albeit in different ways.  On the
"discipline" side, the best sort of "gentle speaker" probably knows
when (and how often!) to say: "That's fine if your budget is $400, but
not if you really need performance" or "Perhaps, but only if your
budget is $80K".

:-)
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