Experiences with a Storage Oriented Cluster
Tertiary Disk is a storage system architecture that uses commodity,
off-the-shelf components to build a scalable, low cost, terabyte-capacity
disk-based system. The prototype uses 20 200MHz P6 PCs hosting 396 8GB
disks. The PCs are interconnected using 100Mbps switched Ethernet.
In this talk, we describe the evolution of Tertiary Disk, from the initial
goals of low cost and scalability to its final application. This application,
the Zoom Project, is a web based image server. At present, this server
provides 37,000 images at resolutions of up to 3,072x2,048 pixels. The
service is available at http://www.thinker.org/. In addition to this
application, the talk also discusses some experiences with a large storage
system. We present some data on the reliability of hardware and describe
challenges in system administration. The talk briefly describes some
ongoing work to ease administration for large storage systems.
For more information, see the
TD home page.
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