SAN's - Who Has Them

[barryfl]

Okay then, So here it is:

 

Who here has a SAN at their site, How much did it cost and was it difficult to setup?

 

I had a guy from RM shoot me down last week because 'Did i have $20,000 to spend on a SAN? NO!!! so i don't think your going to do that, Go along with my RM NAS Box idea...Which...Oh...Wait....Doesn't take user home directorys'

 

Im sure some of you have them so I would love to hear what you got and costs etc A) To solve the problem of space and B) So I can say to my Boss that RM guy was talking out of his arse.

 

Thanks Guys and Girls

 

Barry

[ChrisH]

I dont have a SAN but im looking into getting one. I know Ric has one as does DMcCoy I think. I think for the basics though based on a sata system your only looking at about 6k I think. Then about £150 for the servers you want to connect them to.

[RobC]

As long as you go down the iSCSI route as opposed to Fibre Channel, the costs are a lot less than people think. Also iSCSI is now virtually as fast and virtually as reliable as FC. Reading the Enterprise section of PC Pro shows quite a few iSCSI devices appearing and getting good reviews too. The real beauty of iSCSI being that it runs on conventional ethernet cabling instead of expensive Fibre & the associated FC switches.

[SpuffMonkey]

We have a SAN RAID array connected to our blade servers- IBM DS4000 - the device was about 3k with another 1.5k for the disks. It seems to work OK - though it has "dropped off" a couple of times, which required a full powerdown. Also - it is not very flexible with regard to sizing - partitions have to be attached to each server, and once set and sized - they cannot be easily changed - which will be problematical later on.

[Dos_Box]

We current have a home grown NAS device but I am looking at a SAN for future use. It's the way ahead I think. Simply upgrading your servers as needed whilst the information stays intact in the same place make a huge amount of sense.

[Ric_]

I have an EMC AX100 - cost about £2K with 3x 146GB Disks (which I plan to add to year after year - one of the best reasons for going down the SAN route). The Fibre cards for each server were just over £100 IIRC and the switch was about £1.5K.

 

I would definately recommend looking into SANs - your disk space can then be used much more efficiently and shared between servers with ease.

 

Don't confuse NAS with SAN either. A NAS box won't host your SQL databases for example - SAN gives you block level access which means that it is as if you have the disks in the actual server!

[Face-Man]

I just got a Dell 1.5TB Iscsi SAN (based on EMC ax100) for about £6k (including 6xNic and GB switch) and makes our NAS 160gb box look like a dinasour with loads of room for expansion. It takes a little while and head scratching to setup but my servers have space once more.

[barryfl]

Nice to hear you input guys, Sorry i went a bit dark on this, Been super busy + 1 staff member down due to illness.

 

SAN's i think are the way forward too...I hope to see a SAN solutions in the school i work at soon as i think it would benefit them more than just keep buying really expensive RM Servers (

 

Thanks

 

Barry Leonard

[paul]

Just stuck my Dell/EMC AX100 in this morning sexy piece of kit with the looks to ;-) Mines equipped with 12x 250GB SATA disks

[projector1]

we are now looking for a storage solution, SAN seams to be the route we want to take.

Anybody implemented SAN storage int he last 12 months? I am interested in seeing what flavours are being used in the education market

[Dos_Box]

I installed an EMC\Dell Ax150i (iSCSI) SAN during the summer. I rate it quite highly, although you really need to get someon who knows what they are doing when installing it as the documentation is very lacking. I currently have about 3TB sat in there and all working through a L3 managed GB switch. I run quite a few virtual PCs off it very easily.

[DMcCoy]

I'd buy the latest iscsi revision of the EMC CX300 (CX300i or something I think)

 

I suggest you throw a good 20-30k at it.

 

Edit. Maybe the CX3-10 or CX3-20

[torledo]

I just got a Dell 1.5TB Iscsi SAN (based on EMC ax100) for about £6k (including 6xNic and GB switch) and makes our NAS 160gb box look like a dinasour with loads of room for expansion. It takes a little while and head scratching to setup but my servers have space once more.

 

You was robbed Faceman. The AX100 is complete crud. For that money you could get a proper iscsi or FC array, albeit without the capacity.

 

Agree with DMcCoy, best to throw a good 20-30K at the problem. The clariions are great products but they don't represent best value for money.

 

With a 25K budget I could get a LOT of IBM kit for the money, whereas I'd be lucky to get a fully populated clariion CX3-10 with software come in under budget.

[DMcCoy]

Do note the date of the posts though. Prices have come down quite a lot in some areas with more SME products appearing. Whatever I bought, I'd make sure it was on the vmware esx hcl.

[localzuk]

I have an adaptec snap server 520 with 2TB storage (1.5 when formatted/raided) which is set up via ISCSI - so is a SAN in essence.

 

I'd say it has been a great investment. Fast, stable etc... The only problem has been if a server that is using a partition on it crashes then it can lose all the share details suddenly.

 

That cost us about £3k. If we had spent another £3k we could probably have gone full out FC SAN.

[projector1]

sorry max budget is 6K

Anybody heard of wasabi?

http://www.wasabisystems.com/

http://www.boston.co.uk/suppliers/wasabi/iscsi/

[robknowles]

Hello,

 

I put in a InfoTrend iSCSI Storage System over the summer. I've got 8 x 750GB HDDs as RAID 6 (for double redundancy), with space for 8 more. Not too bad, it does lack Snapshots technology and doesn't feature a redundant controller (but does have 4 x gigabit network cards and redundant PSUs). Seems quite fast. I just use for user and shared documents file storage. Next year, maybe, I might get a Fibre Channel or iSCSI based SAS Storage system for a server consolidation/terminal services project I would like to do.

 

Price wise it was about £3,900. It does now support 1TB HDD's.

 

Rob

[Grommit]

 

Agree with DMcCoy, best to throw a good 20-30K at the problem. The clariions are great products but they don't represent best value for money.

.

 

Who the heck has that much just for storage.???? My boss would freak..

 

How many Proliants or Dell servers with 1tb raid 5 storage can you buy for that much....?

 

About 15

 

I can get a DELL PowerEdge 2950 with Raid 5 and have 1tb space, 4gb RAM, fibre connectivity... for £2740

 

You get power and storage...

 

So why invest in a storage box for 20 to 30K ?

[sahmeepee]

If you were in a Blowing School Funds project it would probably be worth looking at, but for our setup I looked at it recently and couldn't find anything approaching value for what we wanted.

 

For plain old file storage I can't see the benefits outweighing the costs. If you're looking at buying SAS disks especially - the prices reach stupid money quite quickly.

 

Most of the benefits we would get can be achieved in other ways at greatly reduced cost. Considering a couple of people in this thread have had them fall over randomly as well I'm even more wary. Possibly I'm just jealous though

[localzuk]

 

Agree with DMcCoy, best to throw a good 20-30K at the problem. The clariions are great products but they don't represent best value for money.

.

 

Who the heck has that much just for storage.???? My boss would freak..

 

How many Proliants or Dell servers with 1tb raid 5 storage can you buy for that much....?

 

About 15

 

I can get a DELL PowerEdge 2950 with Raid 5 and have 1tb space, 4gb RAM, fibre connectivity... for £2740

 

You get power and storage...

 

So why invest in a storage box for 20 to 30K ?

 

How long does it take to set up another server? How long does it take to maintain another server? How much for windows licenses? Device licenses? etc... How much effort is it to maintain 15 servers and, therefore, files on 15 servers? Backup software licenses? The list goes on.

 

Having a SAN means you minimise the servers needed (and therefore all those things above) and increase the speed and ease at which the storage can be expanded. It also means that upgrading to new servers is a doddle, as no data has to be moved off.

[sahmeepee]

He may not get a 15TB (usable) SAN for that price either, though I do get your point.

 

The question boils down to whether you have enough data to warrant it. If you can fill a single server with over 1TB, you may well be fine for space for the life of the server. At the end of the day you will still need servers in addition to your SAN and depending how you have it set up, you may need backup licenses for them too. You will also need to backup the SAN, unless you have 2 in different locations Without 2 you have a single point of failure which might be hard to recover - again it depends on your circumstances.

 

Everyone here can do the numbers for themselves quite quickly and I'll bet for some folks SANs will work out cheaper over 5-10 years. For us it seems to still be too early.

[Grommit]

He may not get a 15TB (usable) SAN for that price either, though I do get your point.

 

The question boils down to whether you have enough data to warrant it. If you can fill a single server with over 1TB, you may well be fine for space for the life of the server. At the end of the day you will still need servers in addition to your SAN and depending how you have it set up, you may need backup licenses for them too. You will also need to backup the SAN, unless you have 2 in different locations Without 2 you have a single point of failure which might be hard to recover - again it depends on your circumstances.

 

Everyone here can do the numbers for themselves quite quickly and I'll bet for some folks SANs will work out cheaper over 5-10 years. For us it seems to still be too early.

 

OK I can get a 5TB server ofr under 4 Grand... and that's with 2 processors and multiple gig ports..

 

So how would haveing a SAN that 5 times the price justify not having a member server as a file server ?

 

And how do you back up a 15TB SAN anyway ?

[localzuk]

OK I can get a 5TB server ofr under 4 Grand... and that's with 2 processors and multiple gig ports..

 

Where can you get that?

 

So how would haveing a SAN that 5 times the price justify not having a member server as a file server ?

 

And how do you back up a 15TB SAN anyway ?

 

With a second 15TB SAN? That sort of amount of storage indicates some major usage though! I think introducing a quota policy would be advantageous in any school reaching that amount of data. Even if your school has 1000 pupils and you give them 2GB space (which is a lot!) that is still only 2TB. We have 600 kids and 45 computer using staff and between them they use about 250GB of space (I then use roughly 250GB for admin such as ghost images and software). So it would take a huge amount of time to get to 15TB. The point is that SAN's aid managability and ease expansion. Rather than having to buy another server, set it up etc... you just slap another few disks in and depending on the product, either expand a partition to include the new space or create a new NTFS partition and voila, done. Setting up partitions with our iSCSI unit took a total of 10 minutes from opening the box to having it ready and working.

[torledo]

He may not get a 15TB (usable) SAN for that price either, though I do get your point.

 

The question boils down to whether you have enough data to warrant it. If you can fill a single server with over 1TB, you may well be fine for space for the life of the server. At the end of the day you will still need servers in addition to your SAN and depending how you have it set up, you may need backup licenses for them too. You will also need to backup the SAN, unless you have 2 in different locations Without 2 you have a single point of failure which might be hard to recover - again it depends on your circumstances.

 

Everyone here can do the numbers for themselves quite quickly and I'll bet for some folks SANs will work out cheaper over 5-10 years. For us it seems to still be too early.

 

OK I can get a 5TB server ofr under 4 Grand... and that's with 2 processors and multiple gig ports..

 

So how would haveing a SAN that 5 times the price justify not having a member server as a file server ?

 

And how do you back up a 15TB SAN anyway ?

 

You'd be surprised how quickly you can use up those Terabytes once you start creating RAID groups and allocating them to the servers in the SAN.

 

The benefits of a SAN are flexibility, high performance and fault tolerance. Redundant paths and redundant controllers are the hallmark of an enterprise array. Plus stuff like clustering is ideal for SANs.

 

As for backing up 15TB well that's why the cost can increase, additional licensing for remote copy and flash copy features mean you can either replicate what you have stored on disk and then offload or archive to tape. Or the best option, invest in a VTL backup solution using lower cost SATA raid. So the VTL can emulate a tape library, but use disk as oppposed to tape.

 

15TB is the high end of what you'll actually use, with storage virtualization (again more money) you can get very efficient use out of maybe 5TB of useable storage on your SAN.

 

All this costs. As I've said I wouldn't invest 25K-30K in a single SAN array.

I would invest in two arrays (or mixed FC and SATA shelfs) for two different tiers of storage, some kind of VTL or D2D backup solution (incorporating a third array or utilising the 2nd tier SATA array/shelfs).

 

Factor in costs for a SAN based tape library and gigabit or FC switches and yes it's a big project probably going over 30K. But better to invest in that than some other projects i've known schools to throw their money at. With SANs you can really take advantage of blade servers and you're future proofing to an extent. Plus after the initial complexity you're making life easier in the long run.

 

Direct attached storage islands should be a thing of the past, so when you talk about a load of PE2950's with DAS you're really going in the opposite direction to what small and large companies are trying to do. This new direction is possible thanks to iscsi but Fibre channel is still the gold standard.

[projector1]

Hello,

 

I put in a InfoTrend iSCSI Storage System over the summer. I've got 8 x 750GB HDDs as RAID 6 (for double redundancy), with space for 8 more. Not too bad, it does lack Snapshots technology and doesn't feature a redundant controller (but does have 4 x gigabit network cards and redundant PSUs). Seems quite fast. I just use for user and shared documents file storage. Next year, maybe, I might get a Fibre Channel or iSCSI based SAS Storage system for a server consolidation/terminal services project I would like to do.

 

Price wise it was about £3,900. It does now support 1TB HDD's.

 

Rob

 

have you got a contact for the supplier