New Harddrive for Server

[Pear]

Finally I am allowed to upgrade from two 17gb hard drives to something a bit more... substancial for my server.

 

Now obviously I want to buy wisely but I have never purchased anything for a server before. I am wondering if ultra 320 scsis will work with a motherboard that currently has two ultra 160 scsis (dell poweredge 1400). I want to use the drive as a user storage area, so estimating each user will take up 100mb with 1000 users = 100gb.

 

I think I would buy http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3V9W&CategorySelectedId=11154&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11154,40836,4294960494,40143 if no one gave me any advice. Any suggestions or feedback from current harddrives you have ?

[Ric_]

@Pear: You could invest in a SAN which would allow you to use your drive space for years to come - my recommendation. A NAS running Windows Storage Server is another option since you only want to share homedrives. You also aren't leaving much room for expansion.

 

If you definately just want to swap the disks, you could always add a new controller but I'm pretty sure that the drives will run (assuming the connectors are the same) all be it at half the speed they could be running at.

[Dos_Box]

To be honest Pear, I would not contemplate upgradeing a SCSI server these days. SATA has huge capacities, low prices and the ability to RIAD very easily. I built a NAS device with over a terabyte of storage for £700. That was for all of the components such as motherboard, processor, RAM and hard drives etc. Makes you realise how outdated and expensive SCSI is now.

[kevinmcaleer]

But then, this is a server, you don't want to buy 'cheap', if any of the data stored on the drive is of any value. For a 'safe' approach, contact Dell themselves and find out what drives you need. You could then source 'identical' drives from another source possibly cheaper. But I would expect Dell to be able to price match. Its better buying from a main dealer because the warrenties etc are more likely to be honoured. See DB's LiteOn thread for a bad experience of buying cheap!

 

Just found this on techtarget.com:

ATA drives are cheaper than SCSI or Fibre Channel drives and there's a reason. SCSI and FC drives use a processor for executing the commands and handling the interface and a separate processor controlling the head positioning through servos. ATA drives use a single processor for both which means that if the rotational positioning requires more adjustments due to factors such as rotational vibration or wear, more processor time will be dedicated for that which can affect the performance of the drive. Because of this, you will usually see a lower RPM for the ATA disk drive and also a shorter warranty period. But it is cheaper and can be a very good, economical solution for many environments and applications.

 

I'd consider is cheap really worth it when it comes to user data. Its your call.

-Kev

[Dos_Box]

But when it comes to cost and storage capabilities (especially for schools)I truely believe that SCSI no longer cuts the mustard. We don't need the kind of throughput that large companies do. Yes we have 1200 users but naot all at once. SATA RAID will be just as expensive yet offer redundancy, speed, thoughput with greater storage capability for the same price that a small amount of SCSI storage would.

[kevinmcaleer]

And thats fine as long as reliability isn't important!

 

-Kev

[Dos_Box]

With RAID 5 SATA you have reliabilty, redundancy and performance all in one! All for the cost of a couple of SCSI drives!

[GrumbleDook]

I think what DB is pointing at is that instead of on box with some SCSI drives in you can have two with SATA for the same price, one doing the shadow volume or DFS of the other.

 

From the pricing up I did I could actually get 3 boxes ... and some change.

 

The expensive thing for me is the backup to tape. We are starting to get so much data that backup to tape is costly, not for the media but for the tape drives / autoloaders. It almost works out cheaper to have multiple SATA drive in removable caddies to take offsite.

 

I am also interested in CoLo of data, we hook up with another local school and some essential stuff is mirrored, but whilst we are on a 2 meg line that is unfeasible ... even on a 10 meg it is dodgy, I want the 100 meg backbone that Newport LEA have!!!

[MkII]

@grumbledook: I was speaking to a database guy recently who said he nightly backs up 200Gb across a net connection. He used robocopy and some scripting to robocopy from the previous nights backup locally so that the data transferred was really very minimal - but produced a full 200Gb when done.

 

So that sounds a very good idea - I wonder if local schools here would be interested

 

I just replaced a 36Gb SCSI Drive under warranty - the price to replace would have been £200.

[ChrisH]

I use Robocopy as part of my backups. After the initial copy it takes less time.

@Grumbledook I got sick of tape a while back. I backup to a disc in another machine (a decent SATA 24x7 specced one) this inturn mirrors all its contents to an externaly attached sata drive which comes home with me on mondays and the one from home comes in tuesday.

I just syncronise my user data and apps which are the biggest amount of data. The only thing you have to take into account is corruption which happened last week. I was relying on shadow copies which turned out to be fine but the fact that they were on the same array there could have been a problem.

[john]

I am going to be building a Primary School a server and North Yorks LEA do not like SATA yet, but am going to use a WD Raptor 74GB drive for the main data. It will have daily backups and as the Servers main drive is seperate if the Raptor dies, the server will survive, and then just bung a new drive in and away we go. I feel that the Raptors will kill the Small Business SCSI area when people realise how good they are!

[Dos_Box]

'North Yorks LEA do not like SATA'. I'll bet they still love NT 4.0 too.

[Pear]

I'm getting a lot of mixed feelings here and I understand the argument for scsi over raid and vice versa. I think this is leading to is the toaster looking NetGear Network storage central which I can put 2 IDE (not sata ?) drives into and mirror the first onto the second. Or am I going off track ?

[Ric_]

@Pear: Try to push for a little more money and get a SAN if possible - it will last longer and can be used for more... I'm also unsure as to whether those netgear things let you assign permissions nicely.

 

Also bear in mind that, although you may only need 100GB of storage now, that could soon double with the advent of more digital media storage.

[Pear]

I'm not upto scratch on SAN, it sounds like a glorified server that just stores data. I also can't tell the difference between a NAS and SAN.

 

What spec and how much for a decent SAN for a school with 900 users but only 100 connected at one time ?

 

I could put a fancy proposal together over xmas and deliver it when I come back. If I just ask for it then it won't happen.

[Ric_]

A SAN (Storage Array Network) is one or more disk arrays connected to your servers using fibre or copper cable.

 

The disk array(s) don't do anything themselves other than dish out files to the servers at high speed. Your servers are then configured to see bits of the SAN as local volumes - therefore allowing you to store anything you like. One instance that this is great is when dealing with databases (which require block level access - i.e. the disk must be in the machine you are using). Imagine that you have a big database that fills your database servers hard disk. You will have to either replace the drives or the server, which involves huge amounts of work transferring the databse.

 

With a SAN, you would just allocate a bit more of your SAN to that virtual volume - no downtime and no faffing about. If you run out of room, add a few more disks.

 

A NAS (Networked Attached Storage) is a slimmed-down server that is designed just to dish out files over your network. Cheaper NAS boxes don't intergrate with AD too well so be careful.

 

With A NAS you can quickly and relatively easily add a load of storage to your network. You will not be able to gain block-level access and the performance is very much dependant upon the network connection.

 

I opted for a SAN to protect my investment and to give me an easier upgrade path - it's connected to 3 servers hosting user files, Exchange and more. I have approx. 1300 users and my storage requirments aren't huge hence why I went for the EMC AX-100 (which uses SATA disks to keep the price down too

[DMcCoy]

A SAN (Storage Array Network) is one or more disk arrays connected to your servers using fibre or copper cable.

 

The disk array(s) don't do anything themselves other than dish out files to the servers at high speed. Your servers are then configured to see bits of the SAN as local volumes - therefore allowing you to store anything you like. One instance that this is great is when dealing with databases (which require block level access - i.e. the disk must be in the machine you are using). Imagine that you have a big database that fills your database servers hard disk. You will have to either replace the drives or the server, which involves huge amounts of work transferring the databse.

 

With a SAN, you would just allocate a bit more of your SAN to that virtual volume - no downtime and no faffing about. If you run out of room, add a few more disks.

 

A NAS (Networked Attached Storage) is a slimmed-down server that is designed just to dish out files over your network. Cheaper NAS boxes don't intergrate with AD too well so be careful.

 

With A NAS you can quickly and relatively easily add a load of storage to your network. You will not be able to gain block-level access and the performance is very much dependant upon the network connection.

 

I opted for a SAN to protect my investment and to give me an easier upgrade path - it's connected to 3 servers hosting user files, Exchange and more. I have approx. 1300 users and my storage requirments aren't huge hence why I went for the EMC AX-100 (which uses SATA disks to keep the price down too

 

You can have different raid levels (raid groups) within a san box too, just allocate different disks to seperate raid groups. For example, I have a database raid group, raid 10 and then split the space into several luns. I also have a large raid 5 group split into luns.

 

You can also decide which luns to show to which host, so you can keep parts hidden from servers that don't need access (lun masking).

 

If you want you can also boot from SAN and have diskless servers.

[john]

'North Yorks LEA do not like SATA'. I'll bet they still love NT 4.0 too.

I don't think they are NT4 only, but I know they tend to like Intel only workstations, but did not throw a wobbly at my Sempron workstatations, but maybe because my server was Intel that kept them happy. Out of interest, does anybody else use WD Raptors in Server / SANs / NASs and how do you find they perform? I use a Raptor in my desktop at home, and it seems faster than the IDE I had in before.

[Ric_]

My SAN has SATA drives (Maxtor IIRC) and they perform admirally. I'd like to see them turn their noses up at an EMC solution - if EMC can't get it right nobody can!

 

The servers in my config also have local storage for the OS and program files - just how I decided to configure it. These disks are 10000rpm SCSI disks - these also perform admirably (strangely enough ).

[john]

Yeah, my view is that the SATA has developed enough now, and as you can get HP entry level servers with SATA drivers rather than SCSI, its clearly been tested enough, so I am "risking it" and the school have said they will go with me (I now hope I am right!)

[pete]

FWIW, our student fileserver shares ~300GB of space on sata disks without any problems.

 

For the admin network, the new fileserver runs on SCSI drives simply because the last ADMIN fileserver is ~9 yrs old, which is roughly how long the new one will have to last.