Still doomed to have all-local storage on my hosts, I desperately needed something new to host email services for 5000 people. It's a worst-case scenario - 6 million tiny files. We try to spread it out over as many filesystems as possible. The old box has an oldish OS, three XFS filesystems, and is at 100% iowait a lot of the time.

I selected a Dell R510 since Sun is basically out of business (all the sales people seem to have been sacked, and Oracle doesn't seem to have realized yet that Sun made computers.) I selected Xeon 5650 processors to take advantage of a 1.3Ghz bus, and got the box fully loaded with 14 disks. The disks have been configured as 7 RAID1 devices.

The proof is in the numbers: Here is some iostat output while testing the (ext3) filesystems by rsyncing one filesystem with 2 million million files to 2 other filesystems:

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle
           3.42    0.00    2.64    6.63   87.32

Device:    rrqm/s wrqm/s   r/s   w/s  rsec/s  wsec/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sdb1       153.07 137.53 1915.09  7.70 180466.57 1161.82 90233.28   580.91    94.46     1.76    0.92   0.36  69.68
sdc1         0.00 11401.15  3.05 253.77   23.99 93244.58    11.99 46622.29   363.16    60.19  234.41   1.69  43.51
sdd1         0.00 10175.01  1.10 299.80    8.80 83828.49     4.40 41914.24   278.62    46.66  153.69   1.57  47.26

The formatting is a mess, but basically I'm getting 1800+ read iops and 500+ write iops per second through the R510 H700, and it's still loafing. In addition, in each generation of PowerEdges the out of band (iDRAC) management and server monitoring tools have gotten a little better, until they are finally easy to set up. Not too bad.

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