Cheapish iSCSI SAN

[skell]

Hi guys

Could anyone recommend me a cheap(ish) iSCSI SAN? We're looking to run around 10 Hyper-V VM's off it as well as using it for general storage access for students and staff. 4 TB of storage would be the absolute minimum. Probably a budget of £4000.

Thanks!

[jamesreedersmith]

Openfiler

[localzuk]

Look at Overland storage or Drobo. Both are well priced. I have some Overland storage stuff at work here, and it is pretty solid.

[skell]

@localzuk

What spec is your Overland kit and do you run any VM's off it?

[localzuk]

We have a SnapServer 520 - but we bought it when SnapServers were still Adaptec.

Can't really comment on the VM side of things - we don't use it for that, and it is now 3 or so years old, so is a bit out of date compared with their latest offerings.

[teejay]

Anything with lots of disks in it work s pretty well for iSCSI. One thing to be careful of is that you have a really good switch sitting in between your vm servers and the iSCSI box, this is something it's well worth spending some money on. I'm a big HP Procurve fan, but for this role I really would recommend a Cisco as you've got much more control over link aggregation.

[AngryTechnician]

For this role I really would recommend a Cisco as you've got much more control over link aggregation.

It's worth noting that Microsoft does not support link aggregation in Hyper-V environments. In particular, they recommend MPIO for iSCSI instead of using link aggregation on the network hardware.

I've just recently taken delivery of a Dell PowerVault which runs Windows Storage Server. iSCSI and general storage, have 6TB of disks in a RAID5 array in there and it cost me just under £4k. I haven't had it long enough to give it a wholehearted thumbs up (my last iSCSI choice took a few months to bite me on the ass) but so far, I'm liking it. My favourite feature of the week is the built-in ability to set file type restriction policies on particular folders... no more saving .exe files to pupils' My Documents!

[denon101]

I've just recently taken delivery of a Dell PowerVault which runs Windows Storage Server. iSCSI and general storage, have 6TB of disks in a RAID5 array in there and it cost me just under £4k. I haven't had it long enough to give it a wholehearted thumbs up (my last iSCSI choice took a few months to bite me on the ass) but so far, I'm liking it. My favourite feature of the week is the built-in ability to set file type restriction policies on particular folders... no more saving .exe files to pupils' My Documents!

Can you give me some information regarding the specification of the PowerVault system. I am looking for something and what you have bought sounds exactly what I need.

Thanks

[srowland]

Edited due to unauthorised advertising.

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Dos_Box

[AngryTechnician]

Can you give me some information regarding the specification of the PowerVault system. I am looking for something and what you have bought sounds exactly what I need.

Not sure exactly what sort of info you're after, but this is the Dell product page for the model I purchased:

PowerVault NX3000 Network-Attached Storage Details | Dell

P.S. Sadly I'm not on commission from Dell so hopefully this is OK with the advertising rules.

[plexer]

Whatever you buy make sure it has good backup in the event of anything going wrong unless you have the time to spend on doing it yourself with spares on hand.

If it's mission critical then don't scrimp.

We purchased a custom built SAN/NAS from SCL and it's been not working for longer that it has worked, the latest they did to it was fit a new set of drives along with a hardware raid card and I had shelled out for some additional software when we felt openfiler wasn't cutting it and the thing still doesn't work as expected.

So thats just short of £4k we wasted on that.

I'll be looking at getting legal on to it in September.

Ben

[ryman]

Post edited. You have just joined and have recommended React in your only two posts, this comes only a couple of hours after I have warned off React about using this forum for commercial purposes. I shall be making some quite angry phone calls in the morning.

Dos_Box

[Tallwood_6]

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

[nicholab]

You can use an dual controller MSA 60 for a two host VM environment this will scale up to 24TB.

[DMcCoy]

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

If you have a sufficient core switch (with the servers also plugged into it) then I really don't see a need to buy additional switches for iscsi. I did with fibre channel because I *had* to, but today I've just plugged a new iscsi SAN into the core switch. HP 2500s are a bit on the weedy side too, you'd be better off with the 2900s.