I was in the market for an external storage array. I needed around 10Tb of space to run illumina's offline analysis. Our current LSF cluster is not stable enough and the resources are very limited.
I ordered a Dell MD3000 and a 2 cpus x 4 cores AMD machine with a SASe5 raid controller to hook up the MD3k.
My initial idea was to setup a Raid6 11Tb virtual disk and to format it for xfs. By the way, I was using CentOS since dell supports redhat for that hardware.
After reading some basic documentation I hooked the MD3k to the server (I ended up calling it milhouse). I wasn't sure how the server sends the commands to the md3k to configure the system. I setup a vtrack storage array two months ago and the configuration was done over ethernet. This array also allows that but if your server is physically connected to the md3k, that's the only thing you need.
The software installation wasn't very complicate. The CD comes with some rpms that install device drivers and some tools to control the array. I decide to start using the GUI, a java tool.
When I started it I thought, well, this is pretty typical. But then I had this issue: I couldn't configure volumes bigger than 2Tb. I spent a lot of time searching the documentation. The vtrak allowed me to configure a RAID6 11TB volume without problems.
Tired of searching I decided to pull from Linux once again: particularly from LVM. I created 6 volumes in the array and then I exposed them to linux. Once that was done I setup a lvm volume to join them, and finally I created the actual disk.
drio@milhouse ~/tmp $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
128G 5.3G 116G 5% /
/dev/sda3 99M 28M 66M 30% /boot
tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/mapper/md3000-slx
11T 174G 11T 2% /mnt/slx
After some more research I found ="http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/10/01/dell-md3000-great-das-db-storage/">here
that the Dell MD3000 is a re-branded LSI/Engenio array. In that same blog entry, you have
a link to the LSI/Engio documentation. Much better than the Dell one.
posted at: 09:40 | path: /bioinformatics | permanent link to this entry