[THIN] Re: TSCALE or Appsense

  • From: "Rick Mack" <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:56:28 +1000

Thanks Michael,

I've see the ACLs issue at three different customers in the last couple of
years so it's very familiar. You don't always lose your security
descriptors, just often enough to make things exciting. And the "neat" thing
about broken security descriptors is how they make just one part of the file
system slow which makes it really fun to find out what's broken. Imagine
just a subset of your users that are compalining that things are slow....

If you're looking at a truly scalable file server then have a good hard look
at PolyServe. Their active-active many times clustering absolutely blows
Microsoft clusters out of the water and may end up being *the* standard for
large farms. As long as Microsoft don't buy them first.

I haven't been to Pittsburgh or Phoenix though. Are they close to the beach
and can I go sailing in the winter ? ;-)

regards,

Rick


On 1/11/07, Michael Pardee <pardeemp.list@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Reading the section on file serving it's like you worked here for the last
couple of years.  We redirect Favorites, Desktop, My Documents, and App Data
and we have gone through everything you mention below and made all of the
same tuning tweaks, etc.  Even the chkdsk where we lost all of the ACLs, had
to make it everyone change (maybe full) to keep production running, and then
working hours and hours to fix it.  Compression was also a huge performance
killer as admins would use it to address free space issues.  The problem
escalated as the disks got too full and the defragmenting process became
useless.  Adding/expanding LUNs, uncompressing disks, and defragging had a
huge affect on performance.  Backups that took 26 hours to complete for a
single LUN now take 15 hours.  Since we use Windows clustering I believe
there is even a bit more tuning that had to be done and it took us many,
many calls with Microsoft to get it all ironed out.

The hyperthreading comment is something that I will take back for
investigation as well as applying the security via policy instead of the
file level to address exactly what we saw with chkdsk.  We are currently
redesigning our back end file serving to use DFS and Windows2003 x64.  I'm
anxious to see how it works out.

All great suggestions Rick.  I have openings in Pittsburgh and Phoenix,
just tell me when to have your office ready. ;p


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