From: Pascal Grosvenor <Pascal.Grosvenor@(email surpressed).au> Subject: configuring Promise VTrak as a Mac OS X renderfarm volume - tips Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 00:49:45 -0400 |
Msg# 2093 View Complete Thread (4 articles) | All Threads Last Next |
Hello,I'm setting up a new Promise VTrak Raid for a new renderfarm i'm building (it's got 16 x 2 TB drives). It will be connected directly to an Apple Xserve. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for how to configure it ? Given the nature of rendering (having lots of clients writing individual rendered frames back to the RAID) i reason that high write speed is probably the most important feature in choosing a RAID level. I'm thinking 0+1 would give the highest write performance but then i only get 50% effective disk space. I'm thinking there's probably something in between 0+1 and RAID 5 that could be suitable ... That would give more disk space than 0 + 1 and better performance than 5. Would love to hear other people's thoughts and experiences. kind regards Pascal ---- Pascal Grosvenor Faculty Computing Unit, Design, Architecture & Building University of Technology, Sydney ph 9514 8944 |
From: Victor DiMichina <victor@(email surpressed)> Subject: Re: configuring Promise VTrak as a Mac OS X renderfarm volume - tips and suggestions Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:51:11 -0400 |
Msg# 2094 View Complete Thread (4 articles) | All Threads Last Next |
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From: Pascal Grosvenor <Pascal.Grosvenor@(email surpressed).au> Subject: Re: configuring Promise VTrak as a Mac OS X renderfarm volume - tips Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:37:53 -0400 |
Msg# 2095 View Complete Thread (4 articles) | All Threads Last Next |
Hi Victor, thanks for the info on your setup. i'm pondering the following design : left side of VTrak- RAID 0 + 1 using 6 drives => approx 5.5 TB really high speed read & write disk just for rendering animation - 2 spare drives ready to use in the above RAID or the right side RAID right sideRAID 5 using all 8 drives => approx 12.7 TB for use as a general fileserver/ student labshare partition and an archive partition (for staff use only). On 18/04/11 4:51 PM, Victor DiMichina wrote: Hello Pascal. I have the exact same setups in two offices. I am very happy with Raid 6 with no spare. Options available are: JBOD = 29.1 TB formatted capacity. 16 drives at 1.82TB usable storage each. RAID 5 = 27.28 formatted, using 1 parity drive *RAID 6 = 25.46 formatted, using 2 parity drives. *RAID 6 + spare = 23.65 TB using 2 parity drives + 1 hot spare. I highlighted the Raid 6 using 2 parity drives since that's what I use. It's also the setup recommended in Apple's Best Practics for XSAN. Server is connected via Small Tree 10GB Ethernet to the core switch. I am very happy with the performance and reliability. Each office has about 30 users + render farm nodes that hammer their servers all day. Best of luck. Victor DiMichina Pixel Magic Los Angeles • Lafayette On Apr 17, 2011, at 9:49 PM, Pascal Grosvenor wrote:[posted to rush.general] Hello, I'm setting up a new Promise VTrak Raid for a new renderfarm i'm building (it's got 16 x 2 TB drives). It will be connected directly to an Apple Xserve. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for how to configure it ? Given the nature of rendering (having lots of clients writing individual rendered frames back to the RAID) i reason that high write speed is probably the most important feature in choosing a RAID level. I'm thinking 0+1 would give the highest write performance but then i only get 50% effective disk space. I'm thinking there's probably something in between 0+1 and RAID 5 that could be suitable ... That would give more disk space than 0 + 1 and better performance than 5. Would love to hear other people's thoughts and experiences. kind regards Pascal ---- Pascal Grosvenor Faculty Computing Unit, Design, Architecture & Building University of Technology, Sydney ph 9514 8944 |
From: "Jeffrey Jasper" <jjasper@(email surpressed)> Subject: Re: configuring Promise VTrak as a Mac OS X renderfarm volume - tips Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:50:55 -0400 |
Msg# 2097 View Complete Thread (4 articles) | All Threads Last Next |
Ours are actually 2x 16 bay RAID6 for main storage and 2x 16bay RAID5 for
backup storage boxes all run off one Xserve. I have an rsync script that
copies from the RAID6 units to the RAID5 units. No issues with speed, our
storage boxes are dual channel eSAS. The reason I don't mirror my backups
is I have had issues of corruption getting mirrored in the past where the
rsync will skip over the corruption and log it. With our RAID controller
there is no real penalty for doing RAID6 over RAID5 so I like the extra
security of being able to have two drives fail. I also have a RAID1 unit
that a pair of raw drive goes in for individual project backup for offsite
storage.
I will trade data integrity for speed any day as long as the speed does not affect work. On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:49:45 -0700, Pascal Grosvenor <Pascal.Grosvenor@(email surpressed).au> wrote: Hello,I'm setting up a new Promise VTrak Raid for a new renderfarm i'm building (it's got 16 x 2 TB drives). It will be connected directly to an Apple Xserve. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for how to configure it ?Given the nature of rendering (having lots of clients writing individual rendered frames back to the RAID) i reason that high write speed is probably the most important feature in choosing a RAID level.I'm thinking 0+1 would give the highest write performance but then i only get 50% effective disk space. I'm thinking there's probably something in between 0+1 and RAID 5 that could be suitable ... That would give more disk space than 0 + 1 and better performance than 5.Would love to hear other people's thoughts and experiences. kind regards Pascal ---- Pascal Grosvenor Faculty Computing Unit, Design, Architecture & Building University of Technology, Sydney ph 9514 8944 -- Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/ |