New SAN and servers, thoughts please!

[manick]

Hi all,

 

New job at a new school, there is a new additional build and I need another pair of eyes.

 

I've been invited to a meeting at quite short notice re a new build and have been told to spec up some new kit. We are an RM school which I will be moving away from it in the next year when I figure out how to do it (please no pro/anti RM discussions!). There is no virtualisation here and I have an aging 2003 server and one 2008r2 server as the DCs and fileserver. We have approximately 1000 users.

 

I will be using this opportunity to purchase 2 servers and a SAN and wanted peoples input as to whether they can see a problem with the following?

 

I'm looking at a Fujitsu DX60 S2 with 10 x 1TB (10k) disks in a RAID 6 config (this will give us approx. 7TB of space and around 500 IOPS which I would have thought would suffice for a fileserver) I am looking at attaching this to a Fujitsu rx200 S8 server with 32GB RAM initially with server 2012 installed. I will also purchase another identical server to set up as another DC. These are both with a view to virtualising next year when I've figured out how to get rid of RM without too much downtime.

 

Can anybody see any issues with this idea?

 

Cheers

 

Manick

[zag]

General observation... but SAN's are overkill for a school of your size (in my opinion).

 

I've always used local storage on the severs even though we are completely virtualized and its worked well. Many people make the mistake that you need a SAN when virtualizing, but to me its just another layer of complication (and something that can go horribly wrong and effect the whole system). Once you get a good disaster recovery procedure with something like VEEAM, the disk storage becomes pretty irrelevant as its so easy to restore a server to another Hypervisor.

 

SAN's work best in huge organizations where with thousands of servers as a nice way to centralize storage but scaling that down to 10-20 servers really isn't really what they are designed for. Others may disagree of course.

 

Our server design was based on having 7 or 8 identical servers that can run any of our VM's. All have internal SSD drives, some such as the file and backup servers have larger disks.

 

We kept our Domain controllers physical but the hardware is identical to the Hypervisor machines.

[plexer]

SAN's can add a lot of management overhead to a small setup and some form of shared storage to enable migrations of virtual machines is the more cost effective way to go in reality as school probably doesn't need instant availability in the event of an issue so you have time to spin-up your vm's on another host.

 

Ben

[manick]

Hi guys,

 

Thanks for the thoughts. I've just come from a school with around 1600 users and I had a SAN in there which worked well. I am looking to replicate that setup, the management of it I never found to be too much trouble apart from the initial setup. I want to provide a decent amount of storage space with extra room for the future and the DX60 s2's aren't massively expensive. That aside has anybody had experience of the RX200 S8s?

 

Cheers

 

Manick

[Tallwood_6]

Some valid points however you don't have to spend a fortune on a SAN and most setups shouldn't require much admin once implemented and may give you some flexibility in terms of scaling for storage / application needs in the future. You could get a couple of QNAP or Synology enterprise NAS devices with 10gbit cards and SSD caching for less than £6k, chuck in some procure switches for iscsi and you have a quick redundant pool or storage which will last for a while.

[tmcd35]

We are a school of a similar size, our set up is currently - 3 virtual host servers, 1 physical DC, a 4.5Tb (formatted) bespoke file server. We're looking at replacing/augmenting the file server this year.

 

We use Hyper-V for virtualisation and the file server currently uses SMB v2 shares to host the VHD files in a common shared area for all virtual hosts - allows for easy failover redeployment of virtual machines.

 

We are looking at a few options, including a direct replacement and/or a JBOD connected to two server heads. Using Server 2012R2 and technologies such as Storage Pools and Cluster Shared Volumes, SMB v3, we expect to come in with around 10Tb formatted for under £8k. So - no need for a full blown SAN.

 

Certainly wouldn't use an Enterprise NAS though, Unless I could be reassured that they were using quality SAS and a decent controller. Don't most NAS boxes use SATA drives as standard?

 

Starting completely from scratch? I'd be very tempted by the Dell PowerEdge VRTX - PowerEdge VRTX — Shared Infrastructure Platform | Dell UK

[Tallwood_6]

We've used synology & qnap NAS for years or be it for backup iscsi stoarge or for straight NAS duties and never had a drive failure or OS issue, the higher end units are basically servers running whatever flavour of NAS OS. Drive wise most prepopulated units come with WD RED drives which are designed for storage appliances and the higher end models will SAS if so inclined, there are similar warranty options available as well. If you put one up against a similar speced server running 2012r2 storage server I'm pretty sure which would perform better.

 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/storage-appliances/390112/synology-rackstation-rs3614xs

Edited September 17, 2014 by Tallwood_6

[Oaktech]

I'm doing a similar excercise at the moment and I'm looking at 2 hp ml series servers or similar with ~5tb each of das (1.8tb fast 3tb slower) 32gb ram each.

[manick]

Again thanks for all of the replies, I've had an initial quote of £5.5k for a DX60 s2 with 10 x 1.2 tb sas 10k drives (this is with no discounts applied as in a rush), so not massively expensive (although I'm sure more expensive than a DAS unit).

 

Oaktech, I'd be interested to hear how you're getting on?

 

I think I need to liaise with a few more vendors!

 

Manick

[Bobby_Tables]

How many virtual servers do you expect to be running and what functions will they perform? You might need to look at more than 32GB RAM for your hosts.

[Gibson335]

How many virtual servers do you expect to be running and what functions will they perform? You might need to look at more than 32GB RAM for your hosts.

 

Ditto this.

[manick]

Hi,

 

I realise this, but for starters 32GB will be fine for the fileserver. I will install more RAM next year for virtualisation, however in my last place we ran all the Servers we needed to on 3 clustered hosts with 32GB RAM (DCs. filservers, print servers, apps servers etc), occassionally we were a little short, but didn't really causer any problems.

 

Regards.

Manick

[pirran]

Hi Nick,

how about a dell VRTX and vmware -- new bit of kit but seems to work very well for us. Replaces a monster Blade setup that was overkill.

[Gardinho]

Adding extra RAM later on is a little more fiddly then you'd think on modern servers. The modules have got to be paired in a certain order or they don't work. No big deal, but might cost you time at a later stage. Can't echo the comments enough about maxing out the RAM.

 

Also, I'm firmly in the pro SAN camp. For those saying that it adds a single point of failure and over complicates things, this is definitely not the case in my experience. They're designed to give you many layers of fault tolerance and high availability. There's not a lot to them that can fail.

 

You set them up once then never touch them again. I've been running SANs on many networks over the last 6 or 7 years. They work so well when moving vms from host to host, which is one of the key factors of virtualisation.

 

Not saying there's only one way to do it, but I've experienced both and the benefits are worth it, in my opinion.

[Dkeen94]

I'm going the route of 2 ESXi hosts, SAN and DD2T backup at the start of next year! I believe we have bought a Dell MD3220i for the SAN, then we have Dell T420 servers with a lot of RAM in them.

 

I will update with specs tomorrow!

 

SAN is definately the way to go, I am pretty much in the same position as you!

[Dkeen94]

Wouldnt let me edit my post, sorry!

 

Specs for our Virtualisation:

 

Dell T420 Servers with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2450 2.5GHz, 128GB RAM in each host

 

Dell MD3220i SAN 10 TB with 20x 600GB SAS (10K Disks)

 

Dell Backup Server 16TB (Disk to Disk portion of the backup) running Veeam Backup Essentials for Enterprise

 

Tandberg LT05 8 Slot Storage Loader SAS

 

And a new APC Smart UPS!

Edited October 7, 2014 by Dkeen94

[manick]

Thanks Dkeen94, How much are you looking at for that setup? I've had several different options put to me now and some have come out very expensive. Another firm has suggested two Dell servers full of disks which was cheap and at present I'm not sure how that works, so a bit more homework needed.

 

Cheers

 

manick

[ThinkLogic]

Hi Manick,

 

Have you considered the new Lenovo RD650 servers with the latest Lenovo-EMC VNX5150 SAN, both these products are brand new and are industry leading. Would you be up for a conference call with one of the Lenovo solutions architects who will listen and build a proposal around your exact requirement.

 

As Lenovo Gold Partners we can also offer you a proof of concept and evaluation hardware to test. We would love to help out if you are happy to engage with us.

 

Some info below on the new kit:-

 

Servers

http://www.lenovo.com/images/products/server/pdfs/datasheets/thinkserver_rd650_ds.pdf

http://www.lenovo.com/images/products/server/pdfs/datasheets/thinkserver_rd550_ds.pdf

 

SAN

http://www.lenovo.com/shop/emea/content/pdf/Storage/VNX5150/Lenovo_EMC_VNX5150_Data_Sheet.pdf

 

Please let me know if I can be of any further help.

 

Kind regards

Iain