iSCSI SAN recommendations?

[mrbios]

I'm after an iSCSI SAN to act as a central store for VMs.

 

Total of 18 VMs. Including exchange, SQL, SCCM etc. Currently running on VMware, but soon to be transitioning to hyper-v.

Mimimum of 5TB usable storage after RAID. (Will consider RAID10 and RAID6 options, prefer the latter though)

10GB host connections would be nice (It's probably slight overkill for our needs, but as I'm replacing servers as well it's only £100 per server more to add 10GB NICs, so it makes sense to do it now, and certainly removes it from being a future bottleneck for any reason)

 

Obviously i can't get anything exact based on the above info, but some ideas would be nice I need to do a little work to find out what our IOPs requirements are etc.

 

We're looking at a Nimble CS210 or 215 tomorrow morning at a local company, but i feel it's likely to be above what we can afford.

[budgester_]

We use a HP P2000 here, along with HP server and switches.

 

Keeping it all one brand just makes life so much easier.

[Snuffkins]

We use a CS220-X2 here. It's been excellent for the 18 months we've had it. We use it with a Cisco UCS Chassis and Cisco Switches. Can't recommend them highly enough. We've only had a couple of times when support has been required, but they've been in touch with me before I was even aware of an issue.

[teejay]

I must admit, we tend to stick to the same brand of servers and SAN, we had a massive failure with a mix of brands of servers, SAN and swirches on our first attempt with each manufacturer blaming the other for the problem. We now have all Dell with Equalogic SANS and it's been pretty faultless.

If you need to work out your IOPS, speak to Dell as they'll run a bit of software called DPack which will compile a report for you on your current server IOPS and storage use. Other manufacturers probably have a similar thing.

Also worth considering is some of the blade servers with storage, there's some cracking kit out there now and saves the complexity of switches and SANS. It's certainly something we're considering for our refresh.

[mrbios]

I'm looking at leaving branded servers for the first time ever to be honest, I've specced some up on broadberry.co.uk for £2665 each that will fit our needs (E5-2623v3 cpu, 96gb ram, 2 x psu, dual 10gb NICs) which is far cheaper than the likes of Dell or HP seem to be able to offer. Not to mention HP charge a ridiculous amount of money for drives (and i won't even mention their support costs!). Local consultants have been using these for quite a few of their customers and are getting good results. Intel Xeon E5 v3 Series, Dual Xeon E5 Processor, 1U Server, Redundant Power Supply, Dual Gigabit LAN, 8 Drive bays (Did have a breif look at blades but i don't think it's cost effective for what we're after...granted i didn't really look in any great depth)

 

I'm not dead set on it yet, but the prices are quite mouth watering

 

I've never really felt the servers and the storage need to match though. Nice for support purposes i guess but i can't see any technical reason to require it unless there's some fancy software the vendor provides to integrate the two.

Edited November 24, 2014 by mrbios

[teejay]

I'm looking at leaving branded servers for the first time ever to be honest, I've specced some up on broadberry.co.uk for £2665 each that will fit our needs (E5-2623v3 cpu, 96gb ram, 2 x psu, dual 10gb NICs) which is far cheaper than the likes of Dell or HP seem to be able to offer. Not to mention HP charge a ridiculous amount of money for drives (and i won't even mention their support costs!). Local consultants have been using these for quite a few of their customers and are getting good results. Intel Xeon E5 v3 Series, Dual Xeon E5 Processor, 1U Server, Redundant Power Supply, Dual Gigabit LAN, 8 Drive bays (Did have a breif look at blades but i don't think it's cost effective for what we're after...granted i didn't really look in any great depth)

 

I'm not dead set on it yet, but the prices are quite mouth watering

 

I've never really felt the servers and the storage need to match though. Nice for support purposes i guess but i can't see any technical reason to require it unless there's some fancy software the vendor provides to integrate the two.

 

We went down that route when we had physical rather than virtual servers, worked pretty well, but just make sure you purchase either an extra server to what you need or a bunch of spare parts. The problem with if you're going using virtual servers is that if the hardware isn't on the hardware compatibility list for the virtualisation software you can pretty much kiss goodbye to support, especially if it's a complex issue.

[mrbios]

Just been to look at a Nimble box and be given a run through of the technical and sales bumph. Very very impressed! That high price now looks far more teasing! I can see why they get such good press from Nimble users on here.

[bossman]

@mrbios:

 

Have you looked at a hybrid NAS rather than a SAN?

 

Have you considered https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/427

 

We have had one for around a year now just for storage but just recently put 2 VMs on to test and so far not a problem, you can set them up with a mix of SSD for caching and HDD for storage,

 

Might be worth a look as we now hve 32TB storage for approx £4.5k looking into a couple of hybrid systems now purely for VMs and replication.

 

Worth a try