12 avril 2009
ISILON IQ 6000i & actual models
We own a cluster of 5 IQ 6000i, that costed us more than 100 000$, and I would like to describe what is the hardware of each box (20 000$+).
- Server-grade Motherboard
- Pentium 4 Xeon CPU (actual model use Core2 Quad 8200 consumer-grade CPU)
- 4GB DDR RAM
- 12 SATA Hitachis Deskstart consumer-grade hard-drive.
All that for 20 000$+.
On the performance-level, the hard-drive may deliver 8 000Mb/s streaming, or 3600Mb/s with our 2MB random read (our payload is 2MB read at-once, not-so-randomly), and the box deliver 600Mb/s (1/6th) crashing at peak.
I won't say it's too expensive, I prefer to say that it doesn't deliver the expected performance level, at least 900Mb/s on 1x1Gb ethernet link, or 1800Mb/s (50% of practical hard-drive performances) on 2x1Gb Ethernet links.
It just doesn't deliver, at 20 000$+ per box
PS: Naturally our cluster use "infiniband" that is far from infinite bandwidth and is also a limiting factor, even with 5 boxes.
ISILON IQ 6000i & high payload
I upgraded the whole web server, including revising firewall balance between servers, and now we have a big problem with our 100 000$+ cluster of ISILON IQ 6000i:
As shown in the graph, it just crashed yesterday, and worse the only way to retrieve control was to shut it down and on, as the SSH Shell wasn't responding, only the file service, degraded.
I checked if there's a disk problem, and all 12 disks are flagged up and running before the restart.
Today again, as you could see, the performance was degraded during 3 hours, before this box retrieve it's performance level. A 20 000$+ box that offers a 600Mb file service, something I would expect from my desktop PC with it's 3 disks, or from our 2 000$ 1U server box with 3 hard-drives. Without crashing.
The ISILON IQ 6000i is really unreliable: doesn-t support high payload, and worse crash when the payload is too high! The only solution seems to buy a 15 000$ support contract (that won't make it faster) or add other boxes for 30 000$+++
I will replace it with PC Server boxes loaded with big hard-drives, that are reliable and faster.