

How to scale an asset server on a limited budget ? - Xixi
http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=813

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iigs
Fun exercise!

1) The old school UNIX admin solution to this is to make each of your
fileservers NFS servers as well and cross-mount them all with each other.

Pros: it's there, easy, and pretty simple to understand

Cons: NFS clients (the whole OS) can get cranky when a NFS server disappears
silently and the client attempts to access a file on it.

2) You can set up a machine with small, fast disk, and a reverse-proxy caching
solution. Then you can point that cache server at a single server with acres
of cheap disk.

Pros: This can be more economical than scaling machines if you're careful:
buying SATA ports and connecting more disks can be cheaper than buying whole
computers (and rack space, and power, and switch ports) for their SATA ports.

Cons: This technically doesn't solve the problem that you're eventually
bounded by a single system's capacity. Also for certain pathologically bad
workloads the cache server can thrash and performance will fall off.

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jawngee
MogileFS

