[OpenIndiana-discuss] Any HP Servers recommendation for Openindiana (Capacity Server) ?

[Jeppe Toustrup]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 09:28, Open Indiana <openindiana at out-side.nl> wrote:
> If money is not an issue ( you want to buy A-grade hardware) why not look at
> Oracle hardware in combination with Solaris 11. When you buy Oracle hardware
> you have full support on hard- and software in the first year.
>
> I know I am walking on the edge right now, but when you have a budget there
> is no reason to not buy Solaris 11 instead of OpenIndiana.

If Svavar should be spending money on the OS, then why not suggest
Nexenta? They make an storage appliance operating system, and at the
same time contributes to illumos. It lets the OP use HP servers if he
so prefers, and it can help out illumos and thereby OpenIndiana at the
same time.
Sure, Sun/Oracle do create nice hardware, but with the redundancy and
error detection available in illumos/OpenIndiana, I don't see any need
for paying their premium for the hardware compared to other
manufactures.

Svavar, the two points to have in mind when considering hardware for
such a storage system would be:

1. How much RAM it takes. ZFS likes RAM and preferably uses it as its
read cache, which gives really fast response times for often accessed
data. That along with the predictive read-ahead makes large streaming
reads fast as well.

2. How many drives it handles and which types. Depending on your
workload and expectations for the speed of the storage system, you may
want to look into adding SSDs to your setup. ZFS can both use them as
a read cache - extending the existing read cache in RAM - or as a
write cache for synchronous writes, if your application makes use of
that (note: iSCSI writes are always synchronous!).

--
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards
Jeppe Toustrup (aka. Tenzer)