5/11/2023 0 Comments Apple xsan storage![]() This represented about a 6% boost in performance over not masking any LUNs to ports, although about 3% less than the 1:1 mapping scheme. Therefore, we associated two ports to each LUN. While unlikely that a fibre channel port will fail, there can often be a lot of points of failure on the cables, which may go through fibre channel patch panels and other malfeasants en route to their switch. However, on testing failover, we realized that when you perform a 1:1 mapping in such a fashion that you get no fibre channel failover. Therefore, you can create 1 or 2 RAID 6 sets and carve those up into 4 LUNs. With 4 fibre channel ports, we then associated 1 LUN per port. You then have a choice of how to create the RAIDs. This can be done by stopping the nr_target service: Click on a RAID to delete the RAID and associated LUNs for that RAID. When you delete LUNs you need to restart the RAID controller for clients with Apple LSI cards to see them. Click on NumaRAID in the upper left corner of the screen to see details of the chassis, with the RAIDs first and the LUNs second. When you see a login screen, the default username and password is admin/password. The default IP address is 192.168.1.129, so use the address: You manage the RAID by using Webmin, which runs on a default port of 10000. Given the size of the RAID and how Xsan likes to have LUNs added, it seemed prudent to convert those 3 LUNs into 4 LUNs. When the RAIDs show up they have 3 LUNs baked into them. Watching all the statistics on the RAIDs and clients though, I do not doubt that we could have saturated a good 60Gbps. But we ran out of clients, streams, media, etc so stopped testing at that point. Using a combination of vMeter and the Qlogic Enterprise Fabric Suite Manager, we added stream after stream and when all of the clients were running multicam edits for an aggregate throughput of well over 50Gbps, we still hadn’t yet found a place where we started to drop frames. I recently had the chance to put a pair of these things through their paces. More PCI slots, so upgradeable with more cards, etc.ģ6 drive bays at 3TB per bay means 108TB of raw storage running at 32Gbps per chassis.For those familiar w/ Webmin, the NumaRAID plug-in will seem familiar.4 8Gbps Fibre Channel controllers (in the form of Atto Celerity cards).These little firecrackers have a lot of potential upside: So another option that I’d like to discuss is the Rork Aurora Galaxy. And the Xsan environment needs to become more of an ecosystem and less of a vendor lock-in situation. But in order to have an ‘ecosystem’ you really need a little biodiversity. I’ve discussed both here before and they make for very nice kit. ActiveStorage makes a very nice RAID chassis and should be shipping metadata controller appliances soon. With Apple bundling Xsan into Lion and opening up more storage options than before, it seems like time to start exploring alternatives to Promise Vtrak’s for Xsan storage.
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