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SAN's - Who Has Them

barryfl

By barryfl
in Hardware

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TronXP

TronXP

Posted
Posted

Hello,

 

I recently installed a cluster\SAN installation at my school. We run Novell Netware 6.5 and Zenworks desktop managment 7. All of the hardware is IBM, it consists of 4x IBM x336 servers and a DS4200 Express SAN. We currently have 4Tb of storage (mirror raided, so 2Tb useable) but this is expandable upto 8Tb/4Tb on the current chassis, but you can add expanders to increase the capacity further. This is all backed up on our TS3100 Tape library. Including all the racking, UPS etc without software was around £40,000.

 

The SAN itself is a FC but it uses SATA drives, which helps keeps the costs down, mine has 500GB drives installed. So far we have had no problems with it, it has run fantasic! IBM gives you some great CD's with examples of set ups and it has interactive tests to see if you have listend and read properly! I think somebody said previously about the partitioning which could cause issues in the future.

 

If you are looking for a SAN, throw some money at it. IBM offer a lot of good kit for the money, at the time I bought it there was a cash back offer on the SAN's and servers. The only thing with IBM was the wait time on some parts of the orders, the racks for example took 3 months to arrive, I had servers, sans etc in boxes waiting for the racks to arrive to put them in and the UPS took 6 months to arrive!

 

After looking at the Dell equipment at a nearby school I am glad I chose IBM..

DMcCoy

DMcCoy

Posted
Posted
£40.000.00 for storage.. are you nuts ? there is no justification for those massive costs...

 

insane....

 

Ohhh.... it's for the ego...

 

I disagree. There are many justifications for spending more than a pittance on IT equipment in schools, its just that schools usually make excuses due to the budget cycle etc. We are talking about organizations with millions of pounds spent on salary each year. Its the equivalent of one senior(ish) teaching staffs salary for one year. We spent millions on a new block then get upset that the machines are going to cost a few more thousand, its ridiculous.

 

I don't mean that we should be wasteful with money, but we shouldn't always assume cheap is better.

localzuk

localzuk

Posted
Posted
£40.000.00 for storage.. are you nuts ? there is no justification for those massive costs...

 

insane....

 

Ohhh.... it's for the ego...

 

40k for that lot? That's not bad - ie 4 servers, 4TB storage, UPS's, racking, presumably installation, and a tape library. Our rack is probably worth roughly that.

torledo

torledo

Posted
Posted
£40.000.00 for storage.. are you nuts ? there is no justification for those massive costs...

 

insane....

 

Ohhh.... it's for the ego...

 

I'm sorry, but £40000 is not even close to being an average SAN spend.

The DS4200 is entry-level (and a very good entry level box) and the TS3100 is a rebranded ADIC (again a good entry level product)

 

But of course for schools it's a lot to justify for a Storage, but DMcCoy is absolutely spot on. The amounts that are spent, on buildings and infrastructure and other pet projects. And then for management to whinge about a few thousand pounds for something that is truly advanced and something to be proud of is truly pathetic. Large companies will thing nothing of spending £250000+ on their storage every year!!!!

 

Is it an ego thing ? maybe. But it's also best practice and good design. And as I've said theres' an even lower cost of entry with iscsi. Plus school systems have a verying degree of complexity and as such a £40000 spend can be justified.

torledo

torledo

Posted
Posted

Also, the £40000 he mentioned wasn't just SAN spend it included servers and UPS - so it's actually good value.

 

You get what you pay for with storage - notice the people who have used ibm and emc FC arrays aren't complaining. Those that haven't don't know what they're missing.

TronXP

TronXP

Posted
Posted

The £40,000 from IBM was very reasonable. Dell for an equivilant installation but only 2 servers was £56,376, So the IBM deal was a great savings. I can Think of at least 3 schools in this area which have clustered san arrangments and all of theirs cost a lot more than mine.

 

Is it about ego??? No, I purchased a server system which I believe will provide for the school for the next 5 years. It is expandable and upgradable and from what I have seen very robust. Now my system (so far) has had no downtime which has affected users, no more complaining about wanting more storage space. For me worth £40,000.

torledo

torledo

Posted
Posted
This or a SAN ?!?!

 

http://www.jaguar.co.uk/uk/en/xk/gallery/photography_421353F1-81D5-43E1-A2D9-1E07136E4290_405x669.jpg

 

Well, you'd have a hell of an easier time justifying a SAN over the jag.

 

And while you're comparison is midly humorous, how about comparing the cost of a SAN to say a £40000 biometric electronic registration system that still isn't working months after it was installed. I know which I think is more useful and better value for money. Or the £40000 salary a year!!! + add on costs of an older teacher who keeps calling you to resolve the simplest of IT issues, who is ict illiterate and who has next to no ability to use ICT in teaching.

 

Now stop whingeing about the costs of SANs. You're just jealous. Admit it.

chaz6

chaz6

Posted
Posted
Two years ago we procured a SAN from Dell consisting of a Dell Poweredge chassis, a CX300 and a PowerVault 132T to run VMware VI3. We now have 7 blades - one running Server 2003 R2 as the VMware backup proxy, and 6 running ESX 3.0.2. We also have a Dell AX100 which servers home areas, shared areas, administrative installation points and a few other things.
  • 3 weeks later...
ranj

ranj

Posted
Posted

we have an adaptec snap server 520 with 2tb and have purchased a SAN bloc for additonal storage. Can start out as a NAS box but can be setup with iScsi for SAN type setup and you can add storage as your school data grows and you can mix and match SATA and SAS drives. Brilliant investment, really good web interface and is very reliable.

 

Migrating data from windows servers has been an issue even though it has its own migration utility

Lithium

Lithium

Posted
Posted

*looks around quietly*

 

We've got one of them there Dell NX1950 dual head dealies... good tech support though :)

 

(Still no idea what advantage WUDSS has over R2, but then I don't care either :D file goes on, file stays there. Nothing more needs to be done)

sahmeepee

sahmeepee

Posted
Posted

(Still no idea what advantage WUDSS has over R2, but then I don't care either :D file goes on, file stays there. Nothing more needs to be done)

 

From what I can see WUDSS allows you to create iSCSI targets and R2 doesn't. On top of that there's all the usual customised mmc gubbins.

wrights

wrights

Posted
Posted

We installed an MSA1500cs (x2 MSA1000 controllers, x2 MSA30s) to support ESX V3; I think our costs (we already had the disks) were approx £12k.

 

The SAN is one of the best purchases I have ever made and is more than worth the initial purchase price.

 

The SAN's reliability is considerably higher than DAS in each server, this has reduced downtime (and work for my people!).

Disk Utilization is far improved as 'slack' unused space is no longer locked on each server and can be used where it is needed elsewhere.

Management is simple (the SAN management software is very, very similar to the RAID management software on HP servers).

Backups are a dream; ESX can pause a live running server for less than a second, lock the files that make up the disks while writing on going disk changes to a snapshot file, the files making up the disks can then be copied off to storage elsewhere. Instant crash consistant backups for non critical servers.

gshaw

gshaw

Posted
Posted

We bought a NetApp iSCSI StoreVault at the end of last budget, cost about 5k with a year's support. Originally got it to use as shared storage for clustered Exchange then Microsoft went and invented CCR that doesn't need shared storage! Had so much on I haven't even had chance to power it up (only got installed in the new rack in the Summer!)

 

It's got 4 x SATA disks running RAID6 and iSCSI. We got an HP ProCurve Gigabit switch to run the storage network when we get round to setting it all up.

 

Still considering whether to go for storing Exchange data on the SAN or putting it on the server as RAID1 + spare (only 3 disk slots in the 2U server). Then there's the question... to cluster or not to cluster, CCR gives 2 copies of the data plus 2 servers running the service (but won't run our PureMessage spam filter :( ) or SCC with the SAN. Or just 1 server...

 

Might also use it for disk backups as want to do a D2D2T strategy rather than our straight to tape at the moment.

 

Am I right in thinking iSCSI just shows up as a drive on whatever server it's mapped to, so on a backup server you'd just send disk backups to say E:\diskbackup (if E: was the SAN drive letter)?

 

As for 40k on a storage device... alright for some!!!

Guest salan

Guest salan

Posted
Posted

Very interested in this thread, but £40K? no where near my budget.

So anyone any solutions for a REAL cheap alternative?

I have an ailing and full admin server, not enough tape backup and want to flatten the network. So going down the SANS route looks attractive but the budget is SMALL.

backing up a SANS. What do people do? expensive tapes? another SANS? if a disk solution, then what about 'offsite backup?

Alan

m25man

m25man

Posted
Posted

The HP Proliant 320s with 12 SATA's in Raid6 can be upgraded to be iSCSI for less than a grand so thats a 3TB iSCSI SAN box for about 4 Grand each.

 

I like them.

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