[DRBD-user] Best replication link - 10Gbit ethernet, Infiniband, Dolphin

Arnold Krille arnold at arnoldarts.de
Tue Dec 27 18:01:59 CET 2011

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


On Tuesday 27 December 2011 13:54:22 Phil Stricker wrote:
> At the moment, I am thinking about a new system using DRBD (Xenserver with
> VMs using databases).
> To get higher throughput and lower latencies, I wanted to stop using 1 Gbit
> Ethernet as replication link and started to read posts about DRBD with
> alternative connections like:
> - 10 Gbit/s Ethernet
> - Infiniband (IPoIB)
> - Dolphin
> 10 Gbit Ethernet would be the "easiest" an cheapest solution, but is it a
> good idea to use it?

As far as my (limited) experience goes (from audio-over-network and some drbd 
in testing environments), all ethernet-based have the same basic mechanisms 
introducing latency. For audio this limits the lowest system-latency you can 
achieve, for disk-mirroring this adds to the seek-time of the disks.
There are some attempts in audio to reduce that latency and make it constant 
but the rfcs for that are still emerging and switches supporting it are about 
three times the price as without.
For disk-usage we went for replication A on the single-primary shares as the 
switch and the second machine (with its various buffers) are on a different ups 
and our in-house users got happy.

I wish I could tell you something about Infiniband and Dolphin but I can't...

Have fun,

Arnold
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://lists.linbit.com/pipermail/drbd-user/attachments/20111227/68fb19c2/attachment.pgp>


More information about the drbd-user mailing list