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Re: Researching: Isilon and alternatives

Posted by:
Todd Smith



Date:
03-09-2010,
13:00:PM


On Mar 9, 2010, at 12:33 PM, Dave Algar wrote:

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The entire project used a little over 11TB and had 53 million files for an average of just over 200KB for file size.  I don?t have specifics on how small the files actually got but I do recall seeing a lot of files in the 2 to 4k range.  At the time the decision was made by the pipeline developer to use a lot of small files and bake out a lot of things for quicker load times.  Maybe it worked for him but it didn?t for me.



Sounds like a nightmare.  In order to make that kind of pipeline architecture change you really would have to restripe your NAS to a smaller blocksize to get better performance/storage.  Not to mention partitioning your writes off so that its not absolutely destroying your read performance.  Its kludgy at best to make something like that work in an established studio without running it on seperate hardware until a proper architectural transformation can be doen.

I've seen small fast writes destroy a few enterprise level NAS solutions.  Bluearc has become a better competitor in the small file market but the strength of the Titan is really large file IO.

Todd Smith
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