Hello, I am hoping to embark on hosting some VPS servers soon and would like expert opinions on my SAN configuration. The main reason I have chosen a SAN is for scalability and migration possibilities. I want to be able to supply my clients with a decent amount of space, but not have to charge them lots for it.

I currently have a single server for my SAN which has 6 sas/sata drive bays, raid card with 256mb cache, dual quad core 2.33 and 8GB RAM. I hope for my SAN to be able to cope with the storage for 3xdual quad core 16-32GB RAM VPS nodes. I will be offering 512mb/1gb/2gb packages with around 30-120gb storage space, so this could be 70+ VPS’s worst case.

I was using the SAN server for very low budget VPS’s for friends and have 5x2TB Enterprise SATA drives in RAID5 (256mb raid cache) (64kb stripe) currently and it performs well (300-400MB/sec+ transfer speeds).

I am thinking of a configuration of 6x2TB enterprise sata drives (around 8.2ms seek time) in RAID10 (1mb stripe) for my SAN with multibus fibre channel connections to each node along with upgrading the RAID card ram to 512mb.

I am not worried about the transfer speeds of the SATA disks because this will only improve with RAID10, but what I am worried about is the IOPS which will be provided by the SATA disks.

With the raid cache (512mb) and the RAM of each VPS, I think I may be ok with this SATA configuration but I would like other hosters opinions on this.

The specs of the SATA disks are:
seek time: 8.2ms
sustained transfer: 134MB/s
# of platters: 5
heads: 10
average latency: 4.17ms
read IOPS: around 117
write IOPS: around 160

My nodes only support 2×3.5” disks, so the SAN I think is the best option for me.

Please comment on this configuration and if you think it is enough to support the 3 nodes.

Thanks!

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