MAAS and Hardware Configuration

[Richard Perlotto]

Evening,

I have been looking at MAAS as a possible solution to condense several of
our existing clusters into being more efficient.  We already running anything
from several dozen-node Cassandra clusters to several hundreds of nodes running
Hadoop.

My Google-fu seems very inadequate at this point because I have been looking
at what the recommended hardware configuration for nodes should be.  Some
questions:

* Should the node use RAID?  or JBOD for the drives?  Will it be configured
  properly if you use JBOD?

  - We use JBOD for all of our clusters to spread out the disk IO on as
    many spindles as possible.  We rely on the replication as a means of
    data reliance.

* If you have multiple ethernet interfaces is there a preferred configuration
  for that?  Can the system use multiple ethernet ports for the purpose of
  bonding or increasing bandwidth?

  - We use at least two GigE ports for our slow clusters and 10g for all
    of the heavy use clusters.  If we have the extra interfaces we usually
    also have an administrative network interface independent of the data
    network.

I guess that is a good start for now.  Thanks.


Richard