So....I need to buy a replacement SAN/NAS this week.

[pete]

TLDR: We had a catastrophic power outage that resulted in a backup server losing what appear to be the motherboard and a Sun 7110 dying in interesting (most of the disks according to the LSI tool, BMC is corrupt and it's not responding to anything which implies mobo too) ways. Given the age of the box, I'm writing it off as fubar. (yes, they were all on UPS, hence "catastrophic").

 

Most of the network is up and working (because of redundant services) but a few of the "would be nice" and the "they'll whine if this isn't working" services aren't.

 

I've got the VMs and data, I just have no room to put them anywhere. Services are also not as redundant as I'd like now.

 

Edugeeks: What have you bought recently in SAN/NAS hardware that works, is reasonably fast, provides NFS and iSCSI (SMB would be handy too),doesn't have hidden nasty bits that make youy regret the purchase? I'm after 2+ TB RAW on SAS. If I'm replacing it I may as well ponder upgrading the space. *specifically pokes @sonofsanta*

 

Vendors: What have you got in stock and how fast is your shipping?

 

Want: NAS or SAN box that can provide iSCSI and NFS, predominantly to host virtual machines (currently Xenserver). It needs to handle a mixed workload of 9 vms (linux and windows) with a reasonably even but occasionally spikey load profile. SMB shares would be useful. If it can handle a mix of SAS and SATA (or SSD, SAS and SATA), that'd be cool. The 7110 was 2TB RAW and we used approximately 900GB of the formatted space (can't remember offhand). Looking at 4-12 TB (if I can get a mix of disk types).

 

I'm eyeing up hardware at the moment, but I'm not terribly up on "hey, you need to buy a replacement SAN this week", hence the still quite vague hardware spec above.

[mrbios]

Check these out: EonNAS

 

Not sure what model you'd need but personally i have the slowest model (1000 or 1100 or something) purely for backup storage, the features are good, I've always had good support from infortrend on the older Eonstor boxes i have and i've not had one *touch wood* fail on me yet (5 Infortrend boxes in total, 3 iSCSI SANs, 1 NAS, 1 really old SCSI host SAN which i no longer use) They're relatively cheap in comparison to the competition too.

[teklogic]

you could have a look at the Drobo iscsi boxes, they should be suitable for you. They are great value and easily scalable.

[Kitkatninja]

We've got a couple of NASs and I have to say that out of all of them (we've got Drobo, Netgear and qNap), the Drobo is the best out of the lot.

 

It's not the cheapest, but it comes up straight away after a server reboot, we've got it connected to a Windows server 2012 server for DPM - the other NAS take a few minutes to appear (not saying that the others are bad, just that the Drobo in this case is better)... The one we have is the B800i, fully populated with 8 x 3TB drives.

 

However if it's for speed and data thru-put is needed asap, then I would say go for a san.

 

I guess it all depends on how much you can spend and what your future requirements are...

[Norphy]

Aren't Drobos supposed to have awful write performance?

 

If you're going to run VMs from the thing, a SAN would be the best bet. We're an Equallogic shop, however HP StorageWorks or EMC are good too.

[dhicks]

What have you bought recently in SAN/NAS hardware that works, is reasonably fast, provides NFS and iSCSI (SMB would be handy too),doesn't have hidden nasty bits that make youy regret the purchase? I'm after 2+ TB RAW on SAS. If I'm replacing it I may as well ponder upgrading the space.

 

I'm currently reconfiguring our servers, and I was just setting up a backup server today using FreeNAS 9.1. It's technically a release candidate, but seems to be working fine. That provides iSCSI, NFS and CIFS (SMB shares) and sits on top of FreeBSD 9.1, which supports ZFS on top of whatever hardware you install it on. We've just bought some Dell 600GB 15,000RPM SAS drives for £250 each - 12 of those in a 2U rackmount would give you around 6TB of raw space. 4TB drives are £120 each, if you want to go for volume over speed.

[seawolf]

Do you have support on the 7110? It would have still been eligible and support wouldn't have cost much ($600 per annum maybe). If not, then I have just finished testing several SAN units including the HP P4000s, Sun (Oracle) 7120 and 7320, and XI Systems SANs.

 

I would stay away from the Drobo for anything other than backup storage or as an emergency SAN. They are a toy in the SAN space and I wouldn't trust them with my critical VM infrastructure.

 

The best value for money of the systems I've used or tested in recent hears would be the XI Systems units, which run on FreeNAS and use SuperMicro chassis. You can order them configured with SATA or SAS drives and SSD read and write caches. They'll build something pretty much to your specs and budget. The interface is good and they provide iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and AFP services. The performance of these isn't as good as the Sun units, but it is as good or better than the HPs.

 

The HPs were fine and they aren't overly expensive, but performance was limited as they they typically run in RAID5/6 and had no SSD write cache. They also have a very unintuitive and complex interface compared to Sun or XI Systems units and are not expandable. To get more capacity you have to buy another one. Consultants also typically recommend purchasing two for performance and redundancy. These units tested fine, but were just too limiting to me with no upside. Buying another one whenever I needed performance or capacity improvements just didn't excite me.

 

The Sun 7120 had great performance for the cost. It is a big upgrade from the 7110. The 7320 is on a whole other level than any of the other SANs I've tested. Fantastic performance, expandability, and ease of setup (if you're already familiar with Fishworks and even if you're not). I ended up buying the 7320 after several months of demoing several SANs. I was going to buy a 7120, but Oracle had an EOFY deal going that made the 7320 only 10% more expensive than a similarly equipped 7120. I ordered mine with 2 x Zeus write caches. The performance is unreal. It's going to be even better when I hook it up to a couple of new servers over 10GbE in a couple of months.

[bart21]

Personally I would go for a netapp

[seawolf]

Personally I would go for a netapp

 

Any specific reason? I like to hear what people have experienced with other vendors and the reasons why they like (or don't like) what they are using.

[bart21]

I find netapps easy to use and reliable. The one I used to use had been running solidly for 8 years with not even a failed disk. Although if u ask Geoffb he may disagree as it sounds like it just died!

[seawolf]

I find netapps easy to use and reliable. The one I used to use had been running solidly for 8 years with not even a failed disk. Although if u ask Geoffb he may disagree as it sounds like it just died!

 

I haven't used NetApp SANs so I can't really comment, which is why I asked. If it lasted for more than 8 years without a single fault then one can't really complain when it does pack it in - nothing is bulletproof. Although I once had two Sun Netra servers that had been going for 14 years with nothing more than an annual reboot and maintenance (cleaning). Those things just didn't want to die...

[GeoffB]

It's still going strong fortunately. Sadly I don't speak crazy beeps and random flashing lights and had no idea what it was trying to tell me. (Documentation for an 8 year old NetApp appliance is tricky to find )

[mimic]

@pete I would recommend that you take a look at either Overland storage a NAS SnapScale DX2 appliance that can provide a mixture of SATA and SAS drives that will work with your current virtualised setup. There is also the option, bearing in mind that you would like a mixture of SSD, SAS and SATA drives, of looking at NetApp. Of course it depends on what kind of budget you have. Are you backing up to disk/tape, any replication required and what DR you have at the present time?

[Millgate]

HP & Qnap will be the quickest to ship. Maybe Infortrend.

 

If you like, give me a call and you can have a talk with one of our solutions guys to spec something up that fits the bill. 0114 242 7337

[Abaddon]

NetAPP here, and always has been. Rock solid performance and support. Only had a few disks die over the last 6 years, and they were replaced automatically, next day, after the SAN's mailed NetAPP directly to report the failures. Not the cheapest, but you get what you pay for, and they WILL discount if pushed hard enough.

[dhicks]

Want: NAS or SAN box that can provide iSCSI and NFS, predominantly to host virtual machines (currently Xenserver).

 

I've just got an ad in my inbox this morning pointing out that the latest version of XenServer (now open source) supports Storage XenMotion, which might be worth a look.

[pete]

Right, thanks to everyone who's responded so far.

 

After spending far too long last night getting up to speed with what's out there and poking around to see what they can do I'm currently eyeing up EMC VNXe and Infortrend hardware.

 

I've got a few calls in to vendors and a few more to make.

[SYNACK]

If you end up needing more options the IBM kit can be cost effective, at least hear and not to bad, mainly rebranded and packaged LSI stuff where they have actually bothered to finish the software. Saying that IBM are the only company I know that are able to make their basic config and monitoring tool take 2GB of hd and a GB of ram thanks to bundling every bit of oss in existence but our sas based one has worked well. Luckily they are still made by IBM rather than Lenovo so they still include build quality as standard.

[psydii]

Give the Viglen Storage Group a call. They know their stuff, and have plenty of experienc building SANs. Their product range might not be a good fit, but you'll find out pretty quickly, and they completely remove the hassle of worrying about getting (and keeping) it going:)

[apeman]

Right, thanks to everyone who's responded so far.

 

After spending far too long last night getting up to speed with what's out there and poking around to see what they can do I'm currently eyeing up EMC VNXe and Infortrend hardware.

 

I've got a few calls in to vendors and a few more to make.

 

 

I would go for the EMC, we have the vnx5300 and had an NS120 before it, very reliable kit and the vnx series very easy to configure.

You can download a VM that will simulate the vnx and let you hold 20GB of data. It should give you an idea of what it can do and how easy it is to use.

 

Also try and find your local EMC education contact they will usually give you a massive discount

[Hogwarts-Techie]

We just got a vnx 5300 with 30TB, very happy. we had quotes from net app, IBM, 3PAR, Dell. Performance wise and flexibility EMC where miles ahead. Price was competitive to. Let me know if you want some more info. We used a company called softcat, very professional and honest.

[john]

From personal experience I would avoid the Sun / Oracle SANs, complete nightmare and the support contract costs were too high when it was Sun it was acceptable now its Oracle its too expensive. Also with them killing off the Sun Rays recently I would fear what is next given they are such a small player in the SAN market.

 

If I was buying again I would ensure I got something like an EMC.

[seawolf]

From personal experience I would avoid the Sun / Oracle SANs, complete nightmare and the support contract costs were too high when it was Sun it was acceptable now its Oracle its too expensive. Also with them killing off the Sun Rays recently I would fear what is next given they are such a small player in the SAN market.

 

If I was buying again I would ensure I got something like an EMC.

 

John, if your only experience with the Sun SANs is the 7110 and you purchased it in 2009 when the firmware was quite buggy I can see where you're coming from. The second gen models and firmware from late 2010 onward is a different story. The 7120 and 7320 units are rock solid with great performance, and high reliability. there aren't a lot of SANs you could just go pull the plug on and then expect it to just come up no worries. I have that confidence in the Sun SANs (current gen). I do keep hearing how expensive support is for the Sun kit in the UK, but I have to say that is surprising because I don't find it expensive here in Oz. quite the opposite compared to many other vendors actually. Oracle must be doing something different in the UK?

 

The Sun Ray announcement was a bit of a shock and disappointing, but I doubt the SANs are going anywhere since Oracle's Exadata products use them extensively as backup devices.

 

https://oracleus.activeevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=4410

 

And as I've said before, I've heard horror stories for EMC and HP SANs and have personally seen issues with a couple of HP SANs and saw a million dollar fibre channel Hitachi SAN die on a major Australian retailer about 9 years ago taking the backed databases for two retail chains down with it. Good backups and DR strategy are the key no matter what you're using.

[mrbios]

John, if your only experience with the Sun SANs is the 7110 and you purchased it in 2009 when the firmware was quite buggy I can see where you're coming from. The second gen models and firmware from late 2010 onward is a different story.

 

Could argue that if a company releases a buggy unstable firmware at any point in an enterprise products lifecycle that his distaste for them is somewhat warranted.

[john]

I had a 7110 and a 7120, the firmwares were as bad as each other, iSCSI performance sucked on both boxes on any firmware, SMB was ok but if you had to restart your DNS service then the box would choke till you reset the SMB Service and if you had any latency on DNS it would randomly stop sharing. NFS was reliable though, it never dropped my VMs ever which was good.

 

The statement unplug and it just start, true to a point, again if your DNS isn't 100% perfect then you had no chance with it, if it started before the DNS was ready it would freeze / lock up / not respond and then log files would slowly fill the disks making the box moan.

 

The GUI would randomly sulk if you had too many analytics open which was a shame as I enjoyed using them as they were amazing and that is one thing EMC kit lacks is those amazing analytics.

 

Firmware wise,if anything, the Oracle FW was worse than the Sun ones, I remember the first Oracle branded F/W for them, man it was atrocious and was agreed by a number on here at that time. At least with Sun new F/W was out often which was good as bugs were being fixed, updates and new features added etc... but now its Oracle its not that often, when I last looked it must have been 3 releases or so in the space that in the old Sun days we would have had 10.

 

Having seem what an EMC bit of tin does as we have enough of them where I now work and the issues I and others on here had with the Sun kit (including a colleague I work with) I would not spend that money again on them it would be better invested in something from EMC.

 

RE the support, when it used to be few hundred £s a year with Sun and it shot up to be closer to £1K for the 7110 as Oracle only were willing to do a Platinum 24x7x365 support contract at the time that isn't what we wanted and thus blew the budget and the 7120 was even worse which was a shame, with the costs of those contracts in a few years we could have bought a new EMC array instead. But as the kit was buggy and the only way of support is via them its too bigger risk to take to not have the support on hand. I did get some money out of the contract as the 7120 started eating HDDs 3 in 3 weeks so that is a few quid of value.

 

In the latter times I found the support was also less than acceptable, it seems that the UK had lost its Storage team based in Reading as they were excellent but I never managed to deal with one of them in the last 6 months maybe they have all left, certainly most of the people I had an email for it was returned as undelivered implying they had left which was sad as there was a lot of long timers in that team that knew the kit from day 1 and you could tell were suffering at the hands of Oracle.

 

Support cases were too often fobbed off on your using it wrong, wrong type of data being stored despite asking for advice from them on setup etc.... Best one is the data we were storing was not the right type and had caused a high fragmentation thus it needed re-building from scratch, which is great but where do I put all those TBs of data to allow me to do that, as a result cases were just being closed with cannot do anything till you reformat so I said can they help with a loan unit to move the data to etc... to which there was no response or offer of help / suggestions on what we could do other than buy another SAN as obviously I have thousands of £'s laying around doing nothing....