In January, NCSA will receive the first machines that will be part of TeraGrid: 256 IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Linux servers running Itanium, Intel Corp.'s (Nasdaq: INTC) 64-bit microprocessor. That will be followed by 700 servers in June. NCSA's TeraGrid cluster will include 230 Tbytes of spinning disk initially, running in IBM FastT 700 arrays. Butler says it may possibly add another 200 Tbytes later in the year.
However, Butler says, the TeraGrid SAN is not yet ready for prime time, primarily because of the immaturity of Linux. "In a Linux environment, it's hard to build a bulletproof SAN," she says. "Right now the Linux OS can't failover to an alternate path to their system disk. I don't have support from the file system, so if the Linux systems go down they're dead in the water."
Older Unix operating systems, such as those from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), already include multipath I/O. Butler says Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) and other vendors are building enterprise features into Linux.
"Linux is new," Butler says. "This is part of its evolution, and we're pushing the technology as fast as it can go."
Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com
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