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Is anyone using OpenFiler in anger ??
I'm starting to look around at SAN's for our college as storage is getting a problem & I've looked at the big boys like EMC, Hitachi & Equalogic / Dell but they are soooooo expensive.
I realise that these solutions are very powerful but looking at OpenFiler I think it'll do everything I want such as iSCSI etc.
If you are using it in anger what hardware are you running it on & what jobs is it doing ??
Thanks
Brian
I use it in the office for an iSCSI backup drive. Nothing very important gets backed up to it but it always works perfectly. Has the ability to do its own "snapshots" which can be handy.
Works very well as an iSCSI drive with Server 2003/2008 and Vista. I have even managed to get it working with OSX using a third party initiator.
What sort of hardware you using, old workstation or something special ??
Nothing special at all. I have an old P3 system with 512MB RAM stuffed in the corner of my ultra modern server room (old cleaning cupboard :-)). I have a hardware PCI IDE Raid card in set up for Raid 1 and it offers me a fair amount of basic protection.
I don't know if I would trust anything mission critical being on it but then that's really up to you. The main reason I set it up was for the iSCSI connection to my Server and desktop machines.
Using openfiler here for:
A) iSCSI targets for backing up W2k8 servers.
B) RSync over SSH for backing up Linux servers.
How much storage are you looking at?
I was thinking around 5 Tb's
What I'm think about it for is things like removing local storage for our Samba server that hold our student / staff personal space, things like that.
We're also starting to look at virtualisation with HyperV so it would be good to use it to hold the virtual machines so we can do things like live migration when W2k8 R2 is released.
Brian
Balancing a home grown box against the expense of something from EMC or so, might I suggest you have a look at the Sun 'Open Storage' 7000 Series appliances.
I think the 7110 would be a little under the requirement at 4TB native capacity but the 7210 might scale nicely both now and in the future.
We've supplied a fair few folks on here with these units, have a nose in the Hardware forum and if you want any more info drop me a pm or email.
Some info and tech specs here
Don't forget freenas.
FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home
Was going to mention this myself earlier as it is very similar to Openfiler.Quote:
Originally Posted by mattx
I do find Openfiler is easier to configure and manage with a little bit of knowledge, and much much better at dealing with software raid systems though. Not that I think software raid is going to be an issue with the poster.
Can agree with Kim, these are WELL worth a look and the cost :) Mine arrives I hope next week but Ric has some and they are lovely and they have a simulator VM that shows it in all its glory and it really is good! Well worth blowing my tiny budget on it for the goodness I will get from it once it arrives.Quote:
Originally Posted by kmount
+1 on this too. We have a Sun 7410 here (22TB) and it's awesome. Less than a third of the comparative NetApp price so they're definitely more affordable than the competition. Give me a shout if you want any info on ours. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by john
Chris
$35k!? for the unit and 46x 1TB SATA2 drives? I was looking at Dell SANs the other day for D2D2T backup (need ~25TB) and for the unit with 15x 2TB drives, which are 3x the price of 1TB Drives (not bought from Dell mind) it was going to cost ~£5k
To be fair though, what did the Dell box provide in terms of accessibility? The Sun S7000 series is Unified Storage, so you're getting block-level and file-level all from one device. It'll do Active Directory authenticated CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, as well as HTTP, FTP, etc. The Dell you looked at might do this too for all I know, but the Sun stuff does handle multi-protocol very well. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Midget
£35k for 46TB of unified storage is a bargain as far as I'm concerned, especially with a 4-hour warranty on parts. Yes, you can get your drives cheaper elsewhere when you specced out the Dell, but what's the support going to be like for the whole unit when it's installed?
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but it depends what you're looking for. If you need block-level storage access over a network and are happy to supply the drives yourself then then Dell sounds like an absolute bargain. However, if you need a multi-protocol device with full support and warranty, flash acceleration, and the ability to scale up to the Petabyte range then the S7000 stuff is great.
Going up from a £5k Dell it looks expensive, but coming down from a £120k NetApp it looks like a bargain. ;)
Chris
the dell was with a 4hour SLA, RAID6 for HDD redundancy and acting as a SAN (so block level only) to one server acting like a single internal RAID.
It would also work with other servers if you set up the LUNs but I was only interested in one server for D2D2T so I haven't looked at it in detail. It'll also daisy chain to 2 other MD1000s to give 90TB total, if sticking to 2TB drives.
Other than acting as a NAS (which you could do using the OS) what benefit does it have? Is it a fully stand alone server with Solaris on it?
I'm trying to get lots of options together for the new year, but at 6x the price it's a bit steep as an option.