Microcontrollers/ASICs v. General Purpose Microprocessors -- WAS: Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 06:19:14AM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> Oh no, not the CoRAID marketing again (sigh).  @-p
> 
> When CoRAID's AoE stack is feature complete and matching against
> typical, enterprise SAN, please come back.  ;->

Nono, not CoRAID. I understand they're making their money on
disk shelves. Just a bunch of Linux rackmounts with frontal
hotpluggable SATA drives (preferrably, four in 1U, so you can
stripe over RAID 1 or RAID 5 with a hot spare).

I've heard some nasty stories about data corruption in RAID 5,
though haven't seen anything in person, yet.
 
> Really?  I was not aware at all.  I didn't realize you could push
> 6,000,000 frames (1,000,000 jumbo frames) and the CPU-interconnect could
> handle it.

I'm personally not running a cluster, but if you look into the
Beowulf list archives, people are citing impressive numbers.
 
> > Most reasons why software RAID works so well is because cheap
> > CPU and large memory are commodity, and a spare is a lot cheaper
> > and easier to find.
> 
> What's another $100-300 when you're talking a server costing $1,500+
> already?  Especially when you have many systems, so a few spares are
> available?

SoftRAID easily outperforms these $100-300 controllers. And $1000-1500
buys you a couple of servers, or a large pile of SATA disks.

As a semi-hobbyist, it's a pretty simple decision to make.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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