psydii Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 (edited) Is this on the Dot Hill SAN? What disks does it use, how many, and what RAID level. That kind of performance seems pretty woeful for a SAN. I think what is being said is that his server / users are only generating 300 IOPs , not that the San is running slow. That said, while I don't have access to dashboard like that I've calculated that we tend to see around 1000 IOPS maximum during a busy day. Edited July 17, 2014 by psydii
timbo343 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 @psydii you are correct. We dont have a SAN at the moment, we are about to step into the unknown in summer. The attachment i uploaded is the total iops across 8 physical servers. Our peak for iops is during the full backups running on an evening.
seawolf Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 My mistake. There must be a small number of users on the system then. Our median load is about 600 IOPS during the day, but it can spike to several thousand IOPS at times. The image below shows an average of 12,366 IOPS for ISCSI with peak of 50,000 - but this was under heavy load when a very large amount of reads and writes were occurring including migration of several VMs simultaneously.
timbo343 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 No worries . What SAN are you using @seawolf? We have about 450 machines at our place with no vdi and the data was taken around January so when all the school was in, I ran some files around may time but dont have the report for that. Thats some massive iops on your system. Will have to see what happens in september to see if its been spec'd right.
seawolf Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 No worries . What SAN are you using @seawolf? We have about 450 machines at our place with no vdi and the data was taken around January so when all the school was in, I ran some files around may time but dont have the report for that. Thats some massive iops on your system. Will have to see what happens in september to see if its been spec'd right. I would have thought 450 machines would push your backend storage a bit harder than that, but I suppose it depends on how they are using the server storage. Do you use file redirection extensively, or just mostly network shares? And, are you running VMs on that storage or is it just the clients? You stated you had 8 physical servers so I wasn't sure. If you are moving to virtual (and not already) a bit more grunt will be needed, which hopefully your new SAN will give you. We are using a Sun (Oracle) 7320 with 96GB of ARC and a DEP-24P disk tray loaded with 20 x 900GB 10k SAS2 drives and 2 x 73GB Zues IOPS write caches. We have two bays spare for additional write caches or 512GB L2ARC SSDs. A 7320 with this configuration normally went for around 55k, but as it was end of FY and Oracle sales reps basically get to keep every bit of profit on anything they sell as commission in the last month of the FY - we got it for just over half price. I was originally planning to get a 7120 loaded up, but the final quote for the 7320 came in only 1k higher. Is nice, very nice. I don't know if we'll be able to get a deal like that again on its replacement, but with the advances being made in storage we should be able to buy a replacement with at least equal performance for the same or less in 4 years time. The Nimble SANs can also produce this sort of performance in the right specs.
timbo343 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 Ahhh ok, a fair bit of storage there. We mainly use network shares. The only bit of folder redirection we use it to redirect the users documents, favs, downloads, music, videos and desktop to their userareas. The rest of the stuff like appdata is local to the clients. No VMs at our place at all. Just clients and 8 physical servers each with an instance of 2008 r2. Our total storage across all 8 servers is 1.5tb, so not a lot of data to be fair.
seawolf Posted July 17, 2014 Posted July 17, 2014 You should be just fine then with the Dot Hill. Even a lower end SAN should handle that load really well, especially if you don't have plans to run a VM environment on it. Just be sure to configure it as RAID6 or even better RAID 10 if you have ample capacity on it (never RAID5). RAID10 will give you maximum redundancy and performance, but RAID6 is a decent second choice.
timbo343 Posted July 17, 2014 Author Posted July 17, 2014 Thanks for the advice. Im sure they will configure it with Raid10. Im planning to run it with VMs and hyper-v.
glennda Posted July 21, 2014 Posted July 21, 2014 Any pricing on nimble? It all depends on which device you are after and the capacity required. They can vary
nicholab Posted July 21, 2014 Posted July 21, 2014 There must be some pricing out there? Why cant SAN provider just provide simple pricing?
xenonive Posted July 21, 2014 Posted July 21, 2014 (edited) When I got a quote for CS220 12Tb raw it was about £40k for the unit, I ended up getting two HP 4335 SAN's 8TB network raided for under £40k - Went with less space to have the network raid so provides fire redundancy and load balancing. Edited July 21, 2014 by xenonive
pantscat Posted July 21, 2014 Posted July 21, 2014 @nicholab - I could PM you the pricing I recently got, if you'd like? I'm just waiting for a pair of CS240s to arrive...
glennda Posted July 21, 2014 Posted July 21, 2014 There must be some pricing out there? Why cant SAN provider just provide simple pricing? Because it varies so much and they don't charge education the same as they charge a corporate for example - all vendors do it.
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