[Samba] Large site installation

[bkrusic at yahoo.com]

Hi,

I would like to share my experiance as it was gained
in post production where we beat our equipment to
death!!!

Ok;

a) determine site requirments
b) determine budget
c) establish install time
d) predict hidden costs
e) revise budget

You are in a way, project managing this stuff so its
very key that you get it right.

What I found;

Back when 10/100 was the shiznit, a couple of DAS
served via Samba&NFS and distro'd the data for both
load balacing and some form of redundancy.  This
distro'd both network and disk i/o.  The network was
the bottle neck here.

Now, gig e is cheap and the burden has moved to disk
i/o.  Even when I distro amongst several 1TB servers,
I am getting 50% network utilization while file access
slows.  This means that my Raids (DAS; Linux, SGI-XFS,
Samba/NFS, discreeet IDE Raid subsystem to SCSI Ultra
160) are saturated i/o wise.

To fix this, I must either redo my Raids so I have
many more smaller disks (more spindles working) or get
a NAS like a NetApp.  I understand NetApp can go wire
speed so this means that 50% network util means 50%
disk util.

Hope this helps you.

Bri-
PS  The DAS approach is "a lot" more work in that I
must maintain the OS, the IDE subsystem and the SCSI
interface not to mention keep track of the distro'd
data via Dfs for Win clients and autofs&symlinks for
Unix clients.  Look into NAS.  The cost for either
approach is about the same in terms of wether its all
upfront or spread over time in terms of
manitanance/headaches/etc...  The advantage is peace
of mind that a NAS buys you in that one can build a
very robust DAS.

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