The Dell MD3460 controller array can support up to 120 drives with an MD3060e expansion tray attached. Single drive capacities have been steadily increasing, but transfer speeds have remained fairly constant. As a result, RAID6 rebuild times can exceed 24hrs when using 4TB drives. This is the main reason for choosing Dynamic Disk Pools over RAID6 - lower rebuild times are possible since the RAID parity data is distributed across all drives. For the latest Fermi storage configuration, we are benchmarking eight 15-disk DDP volumes on each of the MD3460+MD3060e storage arrays. Both arrays are dual-attached to a failover pair of servers (fermi-gpfs01,2). In a failover scenario, one machine could serve all sixteen DDP volumes.
8 virtual disks (LUNs) are created using separate 15-disk DDP pools. The main reason for choosing DDP over traditional RAID6 is reduced rebuild times since the RAID parity data is distributed across all drives.
The Dell MD3460 controller array can support up to 120 drives with an MD3060e expansion tray attached. Single drive capacities have been steadily increasing, but transfer speeds have remained fairly constant. As a result, RAID6 rebuild times can exceed 24hrs when using 4TB drives. This is the main reason for choosing Dynamic Disk Pools over RAID6 - lower rebuild times are possible since the RAID parity data is distributed across all drives. For the latest Fermi storage configuration, we are benchmarking eight 15-disk DDP volumes on each of the MD3460+MD3060e storage arrays. Both arrays are dual-attached to a failover pair of servers (fermi-gpfs01,2). In a failover scenario, one machine could serve all sixteen DDP volumes.
8 virtual disks (LUNs) are created using separate 15-disk DDP pools. The main reason for choosing DDP over traditional RAID6 is reduced rebuild times since the RAID parity data is distributed across all drives.