openstack team mailing list archive

[Jan Drake <jan_drake@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A presentation at the first openstack design summit was given in which a
vendor did a couple of petabyte swift implementations.  In that
presentation, they explained that in one implementation they used
enterprise drives and another desktop drives.

Enterprise drive failures were higher due to lack of burn-in and cost was
higher.
Desktop drive failures were close to zero as they found a vendor to burn
them in upon purchase.

The net net here is this:

- Use commodity hardware
- Plan for failures
- Use chassis that make it quick/easy to replace drives

Intel is working on a 12 drive array (inexpensive by their terms) that is
meant to be throw-awayŠ sealed chassisŠ automatically fails drives over
and links to other drive arrays.

Cheapest is best for file/object storage.  Block storage may be a
different matter depending on your requirements.


Jan

On 1/29/13 8:42 AM, "Chuck Thier" <cthier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Hi John,
>
>It would be difficult to recommend a specific drive, because things
>change so often.   New drives are being introduced all the time.
>Manufacturers buy their competition and cancel their awesome products.
> So the short answer is that you really need to test the drives out in
>your environment and in your use case.  I can pass on some wisdom from
>our experience.
>
>1.  "Enterprise" drives are not worth it.  We have not seen a
>significant difference between the failure rate of enterprise class
>drives and commodity drives.  I have heard this as well from other
>large swift deployers, as well as other large storage providers.  Even
>if enterprise drives had a significantly less failure rate, the added
>cost would not be worth it.
>
>2.  Be wary of "Green" drives.  The green features on these drives can
>work against you in a swift cluster (like auto parking heads and
>spinning down).  If you are going with a green drive, make sure they
>are well tested, and/or at least have the capability to turn these
>features off.
>
>3.  Go big.  If you can, use 3T or larger drives.  You get a more even
>distribution and better overall utilization with larger drives.
>
>4.  Don't believe everything you read on the internet (including me
>:))  Test! Test! Test!
>
>--
>Chuck
>
>On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 7:11 PM, John van Ommen <john.vanommen@xxxxxxxxx>
>wrote:
>> Does anyone on the list have a disk they'd recommend for OpenStack
>>swift?
>>
>> I am looking at hardware from Dell and HP, and I've found that the
>> disks they offer are very expensive.  For instance, HP's 2TB disk has
>> a MSRP of over $500, while you can get a Western Digital 2TB 'Red'
>> disk for $127.
>>
>> Is there any reason to opt for the drives offered by Dell or HP?  (I
>> assume they're re-branded disks from Seagate and WD anyways.)
>>
>> Are there any disk SKUs that you'd recommend?
>>
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