Red Hat and HP Establish Linux Storage Lab

Rob writes "Linux distributor Red Hat has teamed up with Hewlett-Packard to create a new performance test lab to help customers deploy enterprise storage across Linux environments. The lab will focus on performance and integration testing in order to produce best practices and solutions guides, the companies said, and will also enable customers to preview new technological developments."

It's all about the GFS

[TripMaster Monkey]

Some information on the Global File System can be found here [redhat.com] and here [redhat.com].

Red Hat Global File System

[anandpur]

Red Hat Global File System now supported by Oracle, EMC and NetApp

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database /clustering/certify/tech_generic_linux.html [oracle.com]
http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/home/company/news/ prarchive/2005/press_rh-gfs_support.html [redhat.com]

Re:It's all about the GFS

[AKAImBatman]

Not to be confused with the Google File System [rochester.edu]. A lot of people confuse them (same TLA), so it's important that sysadmins are clear that they are very different. If you install G[lobal]FS, you're getting something that has different goals in distributing the data than those of the Google servers. Google's FS has only a modicum of documentation, and no public implementation available. If you want to replicate GoogleFS, you'll have to guess as to the parts that their documentation doesn't cover.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program. :-)

Re:Who will be the next OEM...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go

http://www.mandriva.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/cor porate/2564 [mandriva.com]

HP Storage Appliances

[dido]

Being seasoned in Linux enterprise deployments, I've had more than my share of frustration with some of HP's own storage appliances. Their entry-level storage appliances, the MSA series (which IIRC, they inherited from Compaq), seem to be pretty ok, but they're no good when you start growing to the point when more than several machines need to attach to the SAN. The VA series of high-end storage appliances are in contrast the very devil to deal with. I remember the problems a client of ours was having with these monsters when they were using it for Oracle 9i RAC. Their RAID management started having problems once the disks started filling up to more than 75% capacity, and HP never was able to give us a satisfactory solution, except to replace the damn storage array with something bigger and much more expensive. And so overtures from the likes of EMC began to reach much more receptive ears...

I certainly hope this helps with the engineering of HP's storage appliance line, and they can fix some of the brain damage that some of them have.

Re:It's all about the GFS

[spacey]

IIRC AFS only provides for a single system to be the writer to the whole distributed filesystem (though it does allow replicants so even if the main server dies the files are still available for read).

GFS allows every node to read and write simultaneously so each system can get full bandwidth out of the storage unit.

They're rather different beasts, solving different problems.

-Peter

Re:It's about time that...

[FuckTheModerators]

I think Wal-mart tried this and was strong-armed by M$soft.

Evil though the Walton empire may be, they are still selling systems with no os. [walmart.com]

Oracle and Linux set world record for TPC-H

[Anonymous Coward]

See Oracle and Linux set world record [noticias.info]:

"Today Oracle announced a new world record TPC-H 300 gigabyte (GB) data warehousing benchmark for Oracle(r) Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, overtaking IBM DB2's best benchmark performance in the same category.

Running atop an eight-node HP BladeSystem cluster of ProLiant BL25p server blades, each with one AMD Opteron 2.6 GHz processor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters achieved record-breaking performance of 13,284.2 QphH@300GB with a price-performance ratio of $34.20/QphH@300GB. This new industry-leading result surpasses IBM DB2's best TPC-H 300 GB benchmark running on IBM hardware using half the number of processors."

Re:SATA disks impossibly

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that those disk arrays can use SATA disks doesn't mean that they recommend running mission critical databases on SATA disks.

They don't recommend anything, they provide a storage system and it really doesn't matter what kind of disks are under the hood. Yes, even fibre channel EMC Symmetrix (the most high end enterprise storage system) has regular, ordinary disks under the hood. You don't get to choose which disks you put there - it's a complete solution they provide and it's anything but cheap! Now, how can a system like that cost that much if it uses regular disks? You pay for the hardware&software solution that makes a solid proof, fast storage system out of those regular disks.