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I'm wondering if anybody has ever used Dell storage products like the MD3220 array in a JBOD configuration. From what I can tell only perc h810 will work for external JBOD but that is not terribly specific, and for some reason I couldn't find many examples on the web of people configuring dell storage products as JBOD.

My question is: Is it possible to connect to am MD3220 array, or other Dell arrays using a PERC h810 controller and use it as JBOD, and if so do I have to configure every disk in the array as a RAID 0 volume?

I want to construct a cluster for Hadoop, but I have to use big servers, so I'm trying to to find a way to add a lot of storage to them. The type of servers I have to use is R820 from Dell, and they only have 16 disks in them, and I want to have the possibility to add storage as I grow so arrays seem the logical way to go in this situation. As an underlying file system I think XFS or ext4 will be my pick because from what I read on the Hadoop implementation the JBOD is handled by HDFS.

primero
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The MD3xxx series is designed to do RAID in the storage controller, and connect to a plain HBA card. You can use an MD1xxx shelf, which is JBOD, with a RAID card like the H810 (or with the plain HBA, with something like ZFS). Making a set of separate RAID0 LUNs and presenting to the H810 would probabaly work, but there's little benefit over presenting RAIDed LUNs from the MD3220 to the H810 (and making them RAID0 there, if required to pass them up to the host OS).

The best solution, though, would be to replace one or the other -- drop to a plain HBA in the server, or replace the MD3220 controllers with MD1220 EMMs (they share a common chassis, just different modules).

techieb0y
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