>>> On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:11:54 -0600 (CST),
>>> rthompson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx said:
rthompson> Hi everyone, I am attempting to use XFS on a number of
rthompson> RHEL ES 4 servers. [ ... no support ... ]
rthompson> I am wanting to use XFS to create a 120 TB filesystem
rthompson> (growable up to 300 TB).
If that's really «TB», the total is between 2^47B and 2^49B.
Creating a storage system capable of handling that is going to
cost (optimistically) a few million dollars: a cheap bare drive
of roughly 2^38B capacity costs around US$2^8, or roughly US$1
per 2^30B, and that means spending 1/2 million dollars just for
the drives; buying cheap NAS boxes, 2^30B will cost around US$6,
and that means on the order of 3 million dollars just for that.
Quantity discounts are available when buying that much stuff,
but I would not expect too much.
Working with that kind of budget you can easily afford to hire a
team of large-storage-system consultants (probably SGI can be
easily persuaded to hire out the XFS team when that kind of money
is involved) who can advise on the many serious issues involved
at that scale, among which recompiling the RH EL kernel is
probably a small detail.
rthompson> XFS is my only option if I want a filesystem this
rthompson> large, is this correct? [ ... ]
Well, JFS can do that, and so probably can Reiser4. I have not
seen benchmarks for the 2^48B range of filesystem size, but for
some not too recent and rather smaller 2^3xB sizes it seems that
XFS scales better than JFS.
BTW I really hope that you mean "GB", not «TB», because then
things are suddendly very much easier: 128GiB to 300GiB means a
single disc, and RH EL's default filesystem can handle that well,
even if probably XFS can handle that better in most cases.
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