Ric_ Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 Like... WOW! I just bought a couple of Sun 7110 Storage Units and have this morning got round to having a play with one. I haven't configured it how I want it yet... I'm just playing but it's awesome. Initial setup involved the use of a 6-step wizard! That was it... it's done!!! I'm going to set up all the iSCSI and CIFS stuff I want on it later (when I have 5 minutes to kill) and I plan to sync it with the second one which appears to be a tick box. Awesome... truly awesome!
Soulfish Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 That's great to know. Currently looking at buying one of these (although given the conversation I had yesterday it may be turning into two!) later this week
Ric_ Posted March 18, 2009 Author Posted March 18, 2009 That's great to know. Currently looking at buying one of these (although given the conversation I had yesterday it may be turning into two!) later this week Got to make it two... soooooooooooooooooo cheap and it means you can sync them.
pantscat Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 I've been looking at these too... exactly how cheap is cheap?!
Soulfish Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 Got to make it two... soooooooooooooooooo cheap and it means you can sync them. Hopefully it'll be two . Do you know if Sun have released the functionality to use the JBOD units for expansion yet? May be looking to get them now given the price they're available for with the Matching Grant Program!
Ric_ Posted March 18, 2009 Author Posted March 18, 2009 I've been looking at these too... exactly how cheap is cheap?! You can knock a couple of grand per unit off list price as an education customer. The Cutter Project are your guys for these at the moment!
john Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 Got to make it two... soooooooooooooooooo cheap and it means you can sync them. But i'm soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo poor
teejay Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 Just ordered two:D Was holding off for the 4TB version, but one of our file servers has gone belly up:sick:
Butuz Posted March 18, 2009 Posted March 18, 2009 I can barely afford bread and water here never mind two of those How come they don't use 15k drives though? Butuz
pete Posted March 20, 2009 Posted March 20, 2009 I demand a video of Ric shouting at the unit for comparison. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4]YouTube - Shouting in the Datacenter[/ame]
Ric_ Posted March 20, 2009 Author Posted March 20, 2009 @pete: OMG! That's amazing... I want to go back to work and try it out
sahmeepee Posted March 20, 2009 Posted March 20, 2009 You can knock a couple of grand per unit off list price as an education customer. The Cutter Project are your guys for these at the moment! Where list price == what?? What disks did your units come with? I'm hopefully in the market for a SAN box for our other building this year. The first SAN purchase has proved to be pretty good... 8TB in RAID 6 with 8 slots still empty. I was bothered about performance because it's hard to get worthwhile performance stats for any of these devices, but it turns out access is roughly twice as fast as our servers' local disks.
Ric_ Posted March 21, 2009 Author Posted March 21, 2009 @sahmepee: List price is £7.5k IIRC. I have configured my 7110 so that it has 1.4TB of usable storage. The promised 'firmware' patch will allow me to plug in JBOD units (like in the video) to expand the storage further.
sahmeepee Posted March 21, 2009 Posted March 21, 2009 Cheers Ric, that's interesting info. If you have all 16 disks in use it looks like you have quite a lot of redundany. For what I'm after (a mixture of file and video storage with disk-based backup in a different building) I'm not sure SAS disks are really an option. They're certainly not the most cost-effective one as my purposes don't need absolutely breakneck speed, but do need relatively large capacity. The SAN I bought last year does have the option of mixing SAS and SATA, but for now it's only got SATA disks in it. If anyone is interested in a less expensive option, this is the model I went with: AC&NC - JetStor SATA RAID Array Model 416iS | Serial ATA 16-bay iSCSI RAID I think it can take disks bigger than 1TB now, but those were the biggest disks with enterprise models available at the time.
linescanner Posted March 23, 2009 Posted March 23, 2009 Guys, they have just been released under Matching Grant. £8600 for a pair, or £4300 for 1 if you buy 2 X86 servers in the same order. Feedback we are getting from units already supplied is very very good indeed.
cookie_monster Posted April 7, 2009 Posted April 7, 2009 @ Ric, do you have this unit setup on it's own VLAN. We have just purchaced one and now need to start thinking about a new switch to place between it and some of our servers.
Ric_ Posted April 7, 2009 Author Posted April 7, 2009 @ Ric, do you have this unit setup on it's own VLAN. We have just purchaced one and now need to start thinking about a new switch to place between it and some of our servers. It entirely depends on how you use the box. I am waiting for my new budget to be released to finish off properly but the set up will be the following (at least initally): 2x NICs trunked in a VLAN for iSCSI 2x NICs trunked in a VLAN for CIFs/NFS traffic A third VLAN for replication traffic between two 7110s - not sure how to implemenmt this yet (at the moment I am using a schedule out of hours to reduce traffic on the VLAN used for CIFs/NFS) I will then use CIFs to pull the data off onto LTO3 tape (a Sun SL24 Tape Library via a Sun Fire v20z). As we speak I am playing with/breaking LACP port trunking so it's all good
cookie_monster Posted April 7, 2009 Posted April 7, 2009 A tape loader as well lucky you, I'll have to see if the budget can stretch to that. Are you using the SUN units to hold virtual hosts as well?
Ric_ Posted April 7, 2009 Author Posted April 7, 2009 A tape loader as well lucky you, I'll have to see if the budget can stretch to that. It didn't cost all that much to be honest and my old Tandberg LTO2 autoloader was just too small. Are you using the SUN units to hold virtual hosts as well? Once I un-break them
teejay Posted April 24, 2009 Posted April 24, 2009 Well, went live with two of these babies on Monday. Currently running the main network shares off them and they are hardly breaking into a sweat, really performing well. Analytics on them is really usefull, especially the drill down. Initial setup was very easy, but there are a few gotcha's at the moment which will hopefully be fixed in the next software release. Biggest problem has been when copying files over with robocopy where you want to retain the ownership secuirty. At present if you start copying from the root of the share with the /COPYALL option then the ownership will not copy across properly. The only way round this is to manually create the top level folder, set their permissions and then use robocopy to copy into these folders. Aparently being fixed soon. The other fun one was a problem with HP switches, where you set up link agregation and lose all connection to the sun box. A firmware update on the switches fixed this, so not really a problem with the Sun boxes. Overall, very impressed and also very impressed with The Cutter Project who supplied them, great guys.
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now