Fermi currently supports an xrootd service consisting of 33 Sun Thumper/Thor class servers plus 12 Dell R610/620 class servers. Fermi also supports an NFS service consisting of four Sun Thor class servers. One additional Thumper class server is used by LSST. The Sun servers range in age from 4 to 8 years. The oldest Dell systems are three years old.
Fermi is looking to purchase two storage building blocks with ~640 TB each year with ~1/2 to accommodate new incoming data, and the remaining ~1/2 to allow for aged equipment retirement/repurposing. The following proposal resulted from a meeting held 2/18/2015 with Shirley, Yemi, Lance, Renata, Wilko, Richard, and Tom.
Two new Dell R620 systems (~640 TB) were purchased summer 2014 and are in the process of being commissioned.
Two additional Dell systems (~640 TB) are anticipated for the summer 2015. The expected use of these servers will be to increase the xrootd GPFS pool.
Retirement option: Given that wain05x are the newest and most powerful Sun servers in the cluster, we might consider swapping physical disks from wain017/019/020/021 with wain053/054/055/056, then retiring the older machines. Advantages include: newer hardware (~2 years difference), more powerful hardware (12 cores vs 4), more memory (32 GB vs 16), more flexibility if we again repurpose the machines in the future. Wilko rightfully points out that this option requires more labor. Is it worth the extra work?
Early indications suggest yes. The following disk migration is suggested:
Start | replace Seagate with Hitachi from these machines, then retire from xrootd service |
---|---|
wain053/54/55/56 | wain017/19/20/21 |
Date | Milestone |
---|---|
7/1/2014 | new servers arrive, fermi-gpfs01 and fermi-gpfs02 |
7/30/2014 | storage arrays arrive |
9/18/2014 | cables located, beginning of GPFS testing at SCS |
1/13/2015 | xrootd in production (readonly), and data migration/balancing begins |
2/18/2015 | agree upon general Fermi storage plan |
3/13/2015 | fermi-xrd01/02 and wain069/071 drained |
?? | former fermi-xrd01/02 + wain069/071 configured for CNFS service |
?? | NFS data migrated to new service and ready for production |
?? | wain006 migrated to wainZZZ |
?? | all remaining retirees drained |
Ref: NFS/GPFS and Xroot Disk Assets