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

Hi Victor,

thanks for the info on your setup.

i'm pondering the following design :

left side of VTrak

- 2 spare drives ready to use in the above RAID or the right side RAID

right side

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