[svlug] Storage Built to Grow

[Scott Hess]

On 1/11/06, lordSauron <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/10/06, Scott Hess <scott at doubleu.com> wrote:
> > My suggestion for your needs would be to have your main data store be
> > something running over LVM2.
>
> I Googled LVM2 and it looks like it's difficult to install.  Why
> should it be better than LVM?  Does it allow some kind of way to
> connect to NAS that LVM doesn't?

???  I think LVM2 is the default in most current distributions (seems
to me it's been the current version for more than a year), you don't
do anything interesting to install it, though you probably have to
install the tools package.

LVM2 lets you map the physical storage on your machine into virtual
devices that you build filesystems on.  You can more-or-less
dynamically add new disks to a machine and integrate their physical
space into existing logical volumes, or move logical volumes between
physical disks, etc.

> > Actually, though, I suspect you'll be surprised at how much space
> > 250GB is on a webserver.  If you have, say, 1000 users, 250GB might be
> > just fine for a year or two, in which case it's hardly worth devoting
> > more up-front effort to the problem!
>
> Yeah, I expect a bit more than your average amount of data though...
> since in the background (a subnet called staff off of the main domain
> name) me and my friends will be making a video game, which can take up
> a lot of space.  In the end you compress and optimise the textures and
> other data, but the development stages see some scary big data
> floating around...

But, assuming you all have reasonably-priced consumer-grade DSL or
cable modems, your upstream bandwidth (and thus this machine's
incoming data rate) will be something like 128kbps or 512kbps.  It
would take something like 47 days to fill that disk at 512kbps!  Even
without looking at that number, your hosting provider will probably
have bandwidth limits, or if your self-hosting then you'll have a
smaller pipe than the sum of your colleagues.

> I think that 250GB should be a good starting point though.

250GB is _always_ a good starting point :-).

-scott