I am very new to the SBC world. I have an RP but would like to use a Beaglebone Black for an application on my network. The difficulty is that the data involved is on a Thunderbolt RAID array. I can re-export access to that file system on a protocol that these small computers could access, but I had hoped to be able to directly connect and avoid having a proxy computer to maintain. Is there any possibility that someone is working on a cape that could access thunderbolt for disk array connections? Is thunderbolt too proprietary and guarded to work up one’s own solution?
I’m not a Thunderbolt expert, but I think the bottleneck here ( assuming the BBB had access to PCI-E ) would be the CPU. I have been following the concept several years before implemented in consumer product, I still do not know the actual specification, but I am fairly certain the BBB does not have fast enough, or even enough I/O to do Thunderbolt.
However, the BBB can load the kernel and root file system via USB, NFS, and MMC media at minimum. I’ve done all 3 of the above, and they a work very well. The on board Ethernet is exceptionally fast when compared to some PC implementations. The USB hardware I tested was nearly twice as fast at writes, but slightly slower at reads( comparedto NFS ). This may / may not have had to do with my external USB media though.
iSCSI also worked, but was not faster than NFS. Since NFS is considerably easier to setup, I pretty much “gave up” on iSCSI.
Thanks very much for the reply. I kind of suspected that. The thunderbolt works well with the recent mini-macs and I already have it connected to one as a backup device, it would be simple enough to export on NFS and that would do the job. The way I’m planning the app, there would be multiple BBBs accessing the file system plus they would use standard db IO for sql. Given that each BBB would be handling a single web service request (start to finish of one state), I think NFS would be adequate. I had just hoped to take advantage of the raw performance of the Areca RAID we use. You’ve settled the architecture for me and it’s easier to set up a prototype this way. Thank you.
If I can suggest , for storage system , you can try banana pi board . http://www.bananapi.org/
It will have sata and 2 cortex-A7 cores
eagletree,
For development, I do not think there could be a better setup than NFS.Unless you do a lot of native compiling, where USB might be better( faster writes ). For a “production system”, NFS should also be no problem. I’ve yet to experience any problems with it once setup.
Oh one thing I forgot to mention. This is in the context of Debian Wheezy.
eagletree,
For development, I do not think there could be a better setup than NFS.Unless you do a lot of native compiling, where USB might be better( faster writes ). For a “production system”, NFS should also be no problem. I’ve yet to experience any problems with it once setup.
I completely agree with William. NFS for development is the best way to go. No need to scp files onto your BBB. Instead, the BBB rootfs is a folder on your desktop so you can simply copy files to and from this folder. I have Gigabit ethernet so I don’t see speed issues.
Regards,
John
Not that it matters but I thought BBB was only 100mb fast Ethernet, not gigabit…
Thanks for all the input. Yes, NFS should be plenty fast for web service. The 100 mbps does concern me. I found that I had to go with Gbit switches for my present backend net (handles SQL 3306 and steady rsyncs). I am looking at supporting about 45 hits per second (that’s hits, not page views). I just ordered one BBB yesterday to stress test and see if it can handle more than one session per second. Even if we are little slower on such a configuration, the client usually represents the weak link.