mogilefs vs SAN

[Garth Webb]

A SAN and MogileFS will both scale your performance.  However the SAN
won't scale your reliability as well as MogileFS.

The SAN is a single point of failure;  if it goes down your data is lost
or at least the data added since the last backup is lost.  To make the
SAN more reliable you need to buy a more expensive SAN.  Even then I've
seen a SAN costing several $100K, with 0+1 RAID die and lose data
because the disk controller failed.

With MogileFS, if a machine dies, there is no interruption of service
and no data is lost.  To scale MogileFS you just need to add more
inexpensive machines.  There is no single point of failure in MogileFS.

Garth

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 19:43 -0500, komtanoo.pinpimai at livetext.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Our company website has a section allowing users to upload/download files,
> now it's growing faster than our NFS fileserver can scale(we also need to
> do annoying backups).  Most of us agree on using
> MogileFS/Perlbal/Memcached to solve the problem since it's built for
> image/file uploading sites. However somebody brought up an alternative,
> which is SAN, claiming that the price has dropped and more stable. We are
> going to have a meeting tomorrow to compare pros/cons of them.
> Unfortunately, I have only a very slightly idea of SAN, but my instinct
> told me to avoid it, so, does anybody have experience on SAN ? What are
> the benefits of MogileFS over SAN and SAN over MogileFS ?
> 
> -kem