iSCSI SAN system recommendations

[plexer]

5.25TB for £3k.

Ben

[tmcd35]

tut tut. Looking at list prices of the SUN......cardinal mistake.

All my figures where based on list prices for quick comparison and I'm well aware if I jump up and down hard enough on the right sales rep better pricing is available, especially for edu.

Also with the SAN melody aren't you just adding an unnecessary software layer ? ZFS and the sun stack can do snapshotting and other funky stuff. I don't know if it does thin provisioning, but it wouldn't be hard for SUN to add that feature. I like the SANmelody product especially with all the bells and whistle but what advantage did you get from it with your environemtn ?

When I built the last SAN it was 'on the cheap'. 7.2k rpm SATA disks, an old PC with a SCSI card added in, etc. I think we did the whole lot for around £3k. But the disks are a performance issue and at the time (around 2 years ago) the cheapest off the shelf solution was over £10k.

My impression was it really comes into it's own when you want to virtualize different commodity storage arrays. I don't see it's advantage when your looking at purchasing a single array.

Also known as flexibility. You're not tied into any one vendor for compatibility. Running low on storage? Just run out and buy another RAID enclosure and a few drives, snap it in and away you go.

Also, have you got three seperate support contracts to manage with your DIY soluton....or will datacore handle break fix of the ibm and v-trak products on your behalf ?,

This is true. But having used ALOT of Datacore's support, I will say it is very, very, very good. The only downside is they are based in the US so there's the obvious time lag with e-mails.

in either case the SUN is a minor premium to get a single set of hardware and port of call for support. Not that i don't like your DIY suggestion, it's just i don't think the bottom line is always the bottom line if you get my drift.

No, I totally agree! One of the reasons for posting the price comparison was to show how close it is. Which did surprise me. If I was building, I'd go for a cheaper server which would drop the price a bit. I was trying to see how much the DIY solution came in at at the same spec as the SUN. So Quad-Core, 8Gb, etc, etc.

I'll be honest, I'm not actually in the market myself until next summer. But I've requested around £6500 for this project. I have been toying with Openfiler, purely because it's free. But I'd say the SUN is a very interesting option and one I'm certainly not discounting.

5.25TB for £3k.

You haven't got basic details of the server, raid enclosure, and disks you used by any chance?

[plexer]

Sure it's been posted before but:

1.00 SYSTEM System build as per specification below 2,975.00 2,975.00
1.00 CASE/061 Intel SSR212MC2BR Storage Server Chassis 0.00 0.00
1.00 CPUINT/020 Intel Xeon Quad-core E5410 Processor 0.00 0.00
8.00 HDDSEA/022 Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 750Gb Hard Drive 0.00 0.00
2.00 HDDSEA/020 80Gb 2.5" Serial ATA Hard Drive 0.00 0.00
1.00 MEMECC/005 Kingston 4GB DDR2 FB-DIMM Memory Module - 4GB (2 x 2GB) 0.00 0.00
1.00 ZZMISC/002 System Build & 3 Year Warranty 0.00 0.00
1.00 XPRO/063 1Gb X-Pro Flash RAM Pen Drive 0.00 0.00

Ben

[linescanner]

The 7110 is on special to edu at the moment at £,4500 + VAT. I think it runs to end of March.

The other good bit is that you will be able to bolt a J4200 JBOD unit underneath as you need to expand the capacity.

If you need anymore info drop me a PM.

[ssiruuk2]

I have the Dell MD3000i array.

Been very happy with it and its been faultless since it was put in.

I am only using it as a file dump at the moment for user home directories etc connecting to a couple of servers using the MS iscsi initiator. Going to look at using it for proper virtualisation later in the year. Got it for £2,500 with with a load of 300gb SAS drives (was a cancelled order that they wanted to shift!)

Bargain

[Ric_]

The 7110 is on special to edu at the moment at £,4500 + VAT. I think it runs to end of March.

The other good bit is that you will be able to bolt a J4200 JBOD unit underneath as you need to expand the capacity.

If you need anymore info drop me a PM.

I will hopefully be buying two of these off the nice Mr Trevor! They are truly amazing and do more than you could possibly imagine!

PC Pro have also just added it to their A-List!

[john]

I will hopefully be buying two of these off the nice Mr Trevor! They are truly amazing and do more than you could possibly imagine!

PC Pro have also just added it to their A-List!

You have faaaar too much money then Ric, I'm dreaming of having 1 SAN let alone a pair of them, and you probably already have one knowing you

[RobFuller]

At this price it’s a no brainer, thinking defiantly punching one for now (all that I have left in the budget) then will get another one in the new budget for HA. They maybe some expansion bays for extra storage, wonder what performance the 10 GigE modals could bring/worth the cost?

Now just need to find a suitable switch to complement the box any suggestions? Gigabit - 24 port, jumbo frames, flow control, QoS, decent number of link aggregation groups etc. Was thinking Dlink or Netgear as using there kit already.

[ssiruuk2]

2 x Cisco 3750

[moggy]

The Sun 7110 seems to be getting the thumbs up from everybody.

I know we are running out of filestore and I'll have to do something about it. However I am a total novice in this area, how difficult would it be to incorporate the 7110 into a windows 2003 server environment.

[RobFuller]

Mine is going to be incorporated into a mixed 2003/2008, the SUN looks very easy to setup and manage. Though I won’t know this for a fact until it arrives. But overall shouldn’t be too hard that’s the appeal of iSCSI over fibre.

Once I have things setup I can give you some more feed back!!

[linescanner]

The Sun 7110 seems to be getting the thumbs up from everybody.

I know we are running out of filestore and I'll have to do something about it. However I am a total novice in this area, how difficult would it be to incorporate the 7110 into a windows 2003 server environment.

It is so easy you could give it to your Mum, and she would have it in production in about 20 mins.

Drop me a PM and we can talk about the units.

They are on Edu special until 31st March.

[Ric_]

it is also worth noting that you can demo the management interface of the Sun kit on the Sun website

[moggy]

Thanks guys, I've got to wait for an idea of next years budget before it's worth me going any further. Anyway it's good to know it's not rocket science.

[SkreeM1980]

I've been looking quite a lot at iSCSI Sans recently, and due to what i've inherited here with build your own storage arrays which perform badly and can't get any support I haven't considered build your own.

I'm getting towards placing an order for the Sun 7210 11.4Tb model, the great thing is that the software platform is the same across all the 7000 series so the 7110 will be just as easy to configure. there is a VMWare download of a demo on the sun it uses 50mb VMDK files to simulate the storage array but you can get the hang of the config and the settings, I also managed to map a volume and copy data etc no problems.

The other really good offering i found was the Dell Equalogix but i can get much more capacity on Sun for around the same price. Thin provisioning and no feature licensing are 2 of my other draws to these models. snapshot etc are all included too!

Skr