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Office RAID
Each workstation has an iSCSI target blocked off on their drive | |
With the importance of hard drive speed and the high
cost
of SSDs, many hard drives are being over-specified in
size
in order to gain a modest performance benefit in speed.
As a result, most workstation users only use a fraction of
their hard drive space (unless it's full of non-work-
related
files or unless their position is a rare one that requires a
lot of space on the local drive). In the spirit of the
private
cloud and taking a hint from file-sharing networks,
proposed is an office RAID where each workstation is
connected with a gigabit NIC and has a small iSCSI target
partitioned off of the main hard drive. In a RAID-6
configuration, a 100GB space sectioned off of 22 users
would yield 2TB of space available to the team for work-
related files that otherwise isn't being used. (A RAID
level
more redundant than 6 might be employed; 0 would be
far
too risky and 1 would be unnecessary.) The speed
wouldn't
be great; it would be foolish to use that space to boot
over
the network or host a database. This would be ideal for
infrequently consulted reference materials or old
archives
where extra capacity in redundant server-grade storage
devices would be unjustifiable. Laptops would be
excluded
because they aren't always on the network, but the
striping
of the data could prevent sensitive information from
being
stolen (depending on whether a useful piece of sensitive
data could fit in a single block). In advanced
implementations, the programmer might even consider
prioritizing the first n-2 subset of targets by the closest
ping times.
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Annotation:
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A 2TB enterprise-standard HDD costs less than a
day's wages. |
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Setting up a network-distributed RAID array like
this would occupy some pimply geek for days, and
days more to maintain it. |
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Not in my business, thanks. |
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BTW, SSDs have a very limited lifespan. I've had
several of them die within 6 months, as they can't
cope with the constant save/serve cycle many
graphics software packages demand of drives. |
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It wouldn't be worth the time to implement in an
existing installation, but if it becomes part of the
routine setup for new machines, there could
potentially be some payback in larger enterprises. |
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Perhaps. I also note that larger enterprises ask
people to power down workstations, to save money.
Servers, on the other hand, are usually kept running
24/7. |
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//A 2TB enterprise-standard HDD costs less than a day's wages.// |
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How many days wages to recover irreplacable documents from it when it breaks?
How many days wages to deal with theft of the information (when someone can just walk of with an external harddisk)?
The fair comparison is with at least two 2TB HDDs, plus the cost of ensuring they're synchronised and secured, or a decent cloud-based store, or something like that. |
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Okay, so basically the easier option would be to set the information up on a server (which could probably do other jobs as well) - but I think your pricing comparison is naive. |
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//SSDs have a very limited lifespan. I've had several of them die within 6 months, // |
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I've heard it's recommended to have an boring old magnetic hard drive to handle the swap files, as SSD's do have a limited number of writes they can do, if that helps. Hmm, thinking about saving data in stripes.... |
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//SSD's// is there something technical that they can't be produced in 64k block sizes ? When they first came out I had solid-state all scoped out to do all the temporary stuff, and leave the HD to archives, media collections and backups. |
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I dunno, [Loris]. I buy them 10 at a time, so I have
backup and redundancy to protect data. |
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