[Gluster-devel] Recommended hardware for a unify cluster?

[Brandon Lamb]

Hello,

Im hoping someone(s) can recommend commodity hardware to use in a 2
and/or 3 server unify setup.

I am discussing with our other admins about migrating from a
monolithic 16 drive scsi (160 drives) nfs server to a 2 or 3 server
glusterfs setup. Given the two options what would you use for 2 and 3
machines?

Should I use something like

(2)
Quad core 9850
8g ram
8 sata2 120g drives, raid10

or

(3)
Dual core 5600
4/6g ram
8 sata2 80g drives, raid10

If you would recommend a 3 server setup I would probably want the
cheaper hardware where possible. Im just not sure (from lack of
experience) if there would be a benefit to having 3 machines, but
lesser horsepower, than 2 machines.

The use of this is a 215 gig maildir format mail store.Our current
scsi setup is using 73 gig drives on a P4 3ghz, 4g ram.

One of the questions asked by one of the admins was whether a two 8
drive raids would perform as well/better using glusterfs than a
monolithic 16 drive raid. My thought was yes based on we would have
two machines with lots of ram compared to a single cpu, and also
double the bandwidth. Also the cost of buying two 8 drives machines is
less than a single 16 drive machine.

Anyone out there with previous experience with something like this
that can point me in a direction?