Storage - Which Way to Go?

[KarlGoddard]

A general question ahead....

 

You're looking at expanding your schools' storage - dept areas / staff & student user areas etc.

 

Would you spend 30-50k on expanding your SAN or do you invest that money in moving to the cloud.

 

What would your gut feeling be?

[hardtailstar]

We've gone to Google Cloud for storage.

 

We still have some files stored on site.

[Rob_D]

I'd say cloud. You get plenty of storage with the basic tier MS and Google tenancies.

[PotNoodleTech]

No offence, but if your spending 50k on a SAN for a secondary school then you've been sold a pup by the SAN company.

 

I'm refreshing servers this summer, though I only have 10k to spend (for servers and storage) but in any case we require less servers and storage now as so much stuff is on google and office365. I will be going Local Storage again no nas no san nothing fancy - local storage is super fast super good value and just works for 8+ years in a row (maybe replace 1 or 2 disks in the array if your unlucky).

Edited June 24, 2021 by PotNoodleTech

[mavhc]

How much space do you have now, how much is used, what's the breakdown on types of files? video/audio/photos percentage?

 

What are the files used for? What are your clients? 1:1? Shared computers? Do the computers have much local storage?

 

What's your internet connection like? Is it reliable? How many users vs how fast is the internet?

 

Do you do high bandwidth lessons, video/audio/photo editing?

[EddyAllen]

Cloud, without question. As a school you will have unlimited sharepoint storage which I have yet to run in to performance issues on. Having files in sharepoint libraries instead of network shares opens up so many possibilities for accessing and sharing your files. The only reason I would not go for this option would be if you can't get a decent speed leased line.

[dmj]

One of my back burner projects that I had in mind (which I won't get to do as I'm leaving my current role!) was to do a cloud/on premise split. Hyper-converged is the fancy term for business managers. The idea would be to have several (3?) machines on premise with Ceph installed, and then another (3?) in Azure with the same. The azure load, but ideally the on premise too, would be in kubernetes so that it could scale out automatically and self heal if there was a problem. Ceph would then manage the transition of files between the sites. I'd then mount the Ceph system from containers and serve out my CIFS/NFS shares as normal.

I was reading an article by a microsoft solutions engineer about putting (the cloud side) together: https://dev.to/cdennig/using-rook-ceph-with-pvcs-on-azure-kubernetes-service-djc

[Jcx500]

100% the cloud, although we keep some files onsite

[slugshead]

Totally depends on your requirements, how much bandwidth do you have if you go cloud?

 

I've got SAN, NAS and cloud. All with their own purposes

 

VM's/Home folders - SAN

On prem backups and art department storage - NAS

Day to day stuff - G-Suite/Adobe Cloud/o365

[dhicks]

Would you spend 30-50k on expanding your SAN or do you invest that money in moving to the cloud.

 

I'd spend the bulk of any time / money / effort into moving to cloud-based storage, but if you already have local infrastucture anyway (and if you're the kind of place that is considering spending £50,000 on a SAN you probably have a server rack, UPS and cooling) then you could add a server for local sync / backup of that cloud storage. If it's any help, for our school of around 450 pupils / 150 staff we have a local certified Storage-Spaces capable Windows server, with a fast 1TB NVMe cache layer and a slower 70TB disk array that handles our local file hosting and backup, which cost around £10,000 a couple of years ago. That server actually handles our remote desktop aswell, so if you don't need anything to host VMs you can probably get a NAS, complete with NVMe cache layer and 10GB/sec networking, for under £5,000.

Edited June 24, 2021 by dhicks

[MartinT]

You'll still need a SAN for your VMs - we recently upgraded to a Dell ME4024 to take care of our future needs.

 

For all files/documents, we are fully 365 cloud now. It's the best place for them.

[mavhc]

Unless you have RAIC(omputers) and have the storage on your hosts again

[KarlGoddard]

No offence, but if your spending 50k on a SAN for a secondary school then you've been sold a pup by the SAN company.

 

 

I believe my current san was 32K. I was being vague to stop the thread veering into discussing specific san solutions, mainly!

[MartinT]

Our new 50TB Dell ME4024 SAN cost £27k, for comparison.

[Rob_D]

Our new 50TB Dell ME4024 SAN cost £27k, for comparison.

But I can get a storage server with 20TB for under £6K. Why are SANS so much more expensive? (I always assumed they'd bee cheaper, or at least no more expensive than a full fat storage server)

[maark]

Not personally convinced by SANS - from other threads they sometimes give a single point of failure.

I would be looking at cloud but you need right help/advice and buy in from SMT if working practices change which is not always forthcoming.

For onsite I have found separate storage servers with failover cheaper and more robust.

[CSENet_Gary]

A san should only be costing you between 4k to 8k depending on spec, my advice would to take advantage of some cloud services One Drive, Emails, MIS and try to reduce the size of your quotas onsite with quota management. I do not know any school who is fully cloud as the overhead costs are still too high. It is always cheaper to have you own cloud within your server room.

[CSENet_Gary]

100% disagree (sorry ) SAN are designed not to have any single point of failure, dual CPU, dual Power, Dual Controller, the only thing they share is a motherboard and in 25yrs experience I have never know one to fail.

[slugshead]

But I can get a storage server with 20TB for under £6K. Why are SANS so much more expensive? (I always assumed they'd bee cheaper, or at least no more expensive than a full fat storage server)

 

Performance - Both in disk speed and connectivity

Expandability - Easy to add more drives, expansion shelves etc

layers of redundancy - Multiple controllers and NICs

More efficient - Shared storage dynamically allocated to each server

Deduplication and compression built in

centralised backups

Snapshotting - Handled by the SAN

Disaster recovery - Replication and load balancing all built in

Diskless servers - Boot your servers from remote storage

Redundancy - Everything is doubled up, sometimes even quadroupled

Tiered storage - It's not one RAID array, you can have different arrays in one unit offering different performance and block sizes, think SQL 64K on NVMe vs Bog standard on mechanical disks for file storage

 

If your budget allows, what a SAN brings to you is awesome

Edited June 25, 2021 by slugshead

[CSENet_Gary]

If it is cost effective to get a SAN normally depends on how large your server farm, if you only have 2x Physical servers, then you don't need a san. But if you have more than 4x servers, then you should virtualise your network on introduce a san. The main driver for getting a san 99% of the time, is to save money by virtualising your network.

[MartinT]

Agreed, if you have 40 VMs as we do (not all servers, our wireless controllers and telephone system are virtual) then a SAN is superb.

 

The tiered storage is wonderfully automated - it moves VMs around to put the most heavily used (usually SQL servers) into the SSD storage automatically.

[mavhc]

At that price is should be all SSD, with nvme cacheing

[QW3RTY]

We've moved all our file shares to Teams/Sharepoint, a lot easier for staff working off site to access resources without needing to VPN in.

[mrbios]

I recently replaced my storage and servers (3 host, iscsi switch, san scenario) with a hyperconverged setup from StarWind. £35k in all including 5 years of proactive support. Previously had a Nimble san which was about £20k plus £12k for an expansion shelf 2 years later. Prior to that we had a super cheapo SAN....a typical <£10k box like people are mentioning here, and i can safely say that you get what you pay for! The cheap things people mention in a few comments above are crap for a network of any decent size.

 

SANs are expensive and outdated though considering you can couple your hosts in with them for the same price as a SAN alone. You can go much cheaper again if you go down the route of storage spaces direct, which would have been my preference had it not been for my desire to stick with VMware over Hyper-V. Converged/Hyperconverged is the way forwards.

 

However in terms of cloud, personally i still don't feel Microsoft have got it quite right yet with OneDrive. Last time i tried it with shared windows devices i ended up with too much of the: sign out too quickly and file doesn't get synced to the cloud prior to logoff problem. Great for any other scenario such as chromebooks, 1:1 scenarios etc though.