We have a small cluster of six ubuntu servers. We run bioinformatics analyses on these clusters. Each analysis takes about 24 hours to complete, each core i7 server can handle 2 at a time, takes as input about 5GB data and outputs about 10-25GB of data. We run dozens of these a week. The software is a hodgepodge of custom perl scripts and 3rd party sequence alignment software written in C/C++.

Currently, files are served from two of the compute nodes (yes, we're using compute nodes as file servers)-- each node has 5 1TB sata drives mounted separately (no raid) and is pooled via glusterfs 2.0.1. They each have as 3 bonded intel ethernet pci gigabit ethernet cards, attached to a d-link DGS-1224T switch ($300 24 port consumer-level). We are not currently using jumbo frames (not sure why, actually). The two file-serving compute nodes are then mirrored via glusterfs.

Each of the four other nodes mounts the files via glusterfs.

The files are all large (4gb+), and are stored as bare files (no database/etc) if that matters.

As you can imagine, this is a bit of a mess that grew organically without forethought and we want to improve it now that we're running out of space. Our analyses are I/O intensive and it is a bottle neck-- we're only getting 140mB/sec between the two fileservers, maybe 50mb/sec from the clients (which only have single NICs). We have a flexible budget which I can probably get up $5k or so.

How should we spend our budget?

We need at least 10TB of storage fast enough to serve all nodes. How fast/big does the cpu/memory of such a file server have to be? Should we use NFS, ATA over Ethernet, iSCSI, Glusterfs, or something else? Should we buy two or more servers and create some sort of storage cluster, or is 1 server enough for such a small number of nodes? Should we invest in faster NICs (say, PCI-express cards with multiple connectors)? The switch? Should we use raid, if so, hardware or software? and which raid (5, 6, 10, etc)?

Any ideas appreciated. We're biologists, not IT gurus.