I need to build a server which is capable of capturing 20 Gigabit/second network traffic (2 x 10g network adapters - 99% utilization) and store them on a disk with zero packet-lose. The requirements is supply the ability to record 20-30 minutes of continues traffic.
Not being an “Hardware Expert”, I have search the net for today’s fastest hard drives and came up with the following option: Setting Raid-0 (stripe) over 6 x 600 GB WD’s VelociRaptor SATA drives, which claim to be the fastest (sata) drive on earth (6 Gb/s interface) - that would provide 36Gbps writing speed.
My questions are basically, having the hard drive spot sorted out,
- What about the other parts of the machine, what kind of a motherboard would I need?
- What kind of a CPU?
- How many CPUs?
- How much RAM is needed given the fact data is not manipulated but written into the hard drives?
I would like to thank you all in advance for your help and advises.
While I have my doubts about how realistic this sort of thing is with OTS hardware; here's my thoughts:
Each of those drives can do about 1Gbps (max); you'd need an array of at least 20 to get the write performance you need. Realistically you'd probably need upwards of 30 drives to get continuous throughput and some kind of redundancy; though I don't think there's many SAS RAIDs that can do 2.5GBps with RAID5 or 6; so you might be stuck with RAID10.
You'll need 3 to 4.5 TB of usable storage for that much data. With the Raptor drives you'll easily have that much, even with RAID10 (which is probably your best choice here).
The CPU, PCIe lanes, and RAM shouldn't be too much consideration; other than whatever the RAID Card and NICs need. I'd get a fast CPU before one with a lot of cores. It's not doing much itself, just coordinating DMA transfers for the most part. I'd grab at least 4GB of RAM; though more is pretty much going to be better all around.