clodhopper Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Is anyone using OpenFiler in anger ?? I'm starting to look around at SAN's for our college as storage is getting a problem & I've looked at the big boys like EMC, Hitachi & Equalogic / Dell but they are soooooo expensive. I realise that these solutions are very powerful but looking at OpenFiler I think it'll do everything I want such as iSCSI etc. If you are using it in anger what hardware are you running it on & what jobs is it doing ?? Thanks Brian
SC-UK Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 I use it in the office for an iSCSI backup drive. Nothing very important gets backed up to it but it always works perfectly. Has the ability to do its own "snapshots" which can be handy. Works very well as an iSCSI drive with Server 2003/2008 and Vista. I have even managed to get it working with OSX using a third party initiator.
clodhopper Posted July 29, 2009 Author Posted July 29, 2009 What sort of hardware you using, old workstation or something special ??
SC-UK Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Nothing special at all. I have an old P3 system with 512MB RAM stuffed in the corner of my ultra modern server room (old cleaning cupboard :-)). I have a hardware PCI IDE Raid card in set up for Raid 1 and it offers me a fair amount of basic protection. I don't know if I would trust anything mission critical being on it but then that's really up to you. The main reason I set it up was for the iSCSI connection to my Server and desktop machines.
Geoff Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Using openfiler here for: A) iSCSI targets for backing up W2k8 servers. B) RSync over SSH for backing up Linux servers.
clodhopper Posted July 29, 2009 Author Posted July 29, 2009 I was thinking around 5 Tb's What I'm think about it for is things like removing local storage for our Samba server that hold our student / staff personal space, things like that. We're also starting to look at virtualisation with HyperV so it would be good to use it to hold the virtual machines so we can do things like live migration when W2k8 R2 is released. Brian
kmount Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Balancing a home grown box against the expense of something from EMC or so, might I suggest you have a look at the Sun 'Open Storage' 7000 Series appliances. I think the 7110 would be a little under the requirement at 4TB native capacity but the 7210 might scale nicely both now and in the future. We've supplied a fair few folks on here with these units, have a nose in the Hardware forum and if you want any more info drop me a pm or email. Some info and tech specs here
mattx Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Don't forget freenas. FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home
SC-UK Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Don't forget freenas. FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home Was going to mention this myself earlier as it is very similar to Openfiler. I do find Openfiler is easier to configure and manage with a little bit of knowledge, and much much better at dealing with software raid systems though. Not that I think software raid is going to be an issue with the poster.
john Posted July 29, 2009 Posted July 29, 2009 Balancing a home grown box against the expense of something from EMC or so, might I suggest you have a look at the Sun 'Open Storage' 7000 Series appliances. I think the 7110 would be a little under the requirement at 4TB native capacity but the 7210 might scale nicely both now and in the future. We've supplied a fair few folks on here with these units, have a nose in the Hardware forum and if you want any more info drop me a pm or email. Some info and tech specs here Can agree with Kim, these are WELL worth a look and the cost Mine arrives I hope next week but Ric has some and they are lovely and they have a simulator VM that shows it in all its glory and it really is good! Well worth blowing my tiny budget on it for the goodness I will get from it once it arrives.
Duke Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 Can agree with Kim, these are WELL worth a look and the cost Mine arrives I hope next week but Ric has some and they are lovely and they have a simulator VM that shows it in all its glory and it really is good! Well worth blowing my tiny budget on it for the goodness I will get from it once it arrives. +1 on this too. We have a Sun 7410 here (22TB) and it's awesome. Less than a third of the comparative NetApp price so they're definitely more affordable than the competition. Give me a shout if you want any info on ours. Chris
Midget Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 $35k!? for the unit and 46x 1TB SATA2 drives? I was looking at Dell SANs the other day for D2D2T backup (need ~25TB) and for the unit with 15x 2TB drives, which are 3x the price of 1TB Drives (not bought from Dell mind) it was going to cost ~£5k
Duke Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 $35k!? for the unit and 46x 1TB SATA2 drives? I was looking at Dell SANs the other day for D2D2T backup (need ~25TB) and for the unit with 15x 2TB drives, which are 3x the price of 1TB Drives (not bought from Dell mind) it was going to cost ~£5k To be fair though, what did the Dell box provide in terms of accessibility? The Sun S7000 series is Unified Storage, so you're getting block-level and file-level all from one device. It'll do Active Directory authenticated CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, as well as HTTP, FTP, etc. The Dell you looked at might do this too for all I know, but the Sun stuff does handle multi-protocol very well. £35k for 46TB of unified storage is a bargain as far as I'm concerned, especially with a 4-hour warranty on parts. Yes, you can get your drives cheaper elsewhere when you specced out the Dell, but what's the support going to be like for the whole unit when it's installed? I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but it depends what you're looking for. If you need block-level storage access over a network and are happy to supply the drives yourself then then Dell sounds like an absolute bargain. However, if you need a multi-protocol device with full support and warranty, flash acceleration, and the ability to scale up to the Petabyte range then the S7000 stuff is great. Going up from a £5k Dell it looks expensive, but coming down from a £120k NetApp it looks like a bargain. Chris
Midget Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 the dell was with a 4hour SLA, RAID6 for HDD redundancy and acting as a SAN (so block level only) to one server acting like a single internal RAID. It would also work with other servers if you set up the LUNs but I was only interested in one server for D2D2T so I haven't looked at it in detail. It'll also daisy chain to 2 other MD1000s to give 90TB total, if sticking to 2TB drives. Other than acting as a NAS (which you could do using the OS) what benefit does it have? Is it a fully stand alone server with Solaris on it? I'm trying to get lots of options together for the new year, but at 6x the price it's a bit steep as an option.
Duke Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 Sounds like a bargain to me! The S7000 stuff is designed more as consolidated storage, so with CIFS it can take over from all of your Windows file servers, as well as providing block-level for things like virtualisation. You can get most of the functionality from a Windows server attached to a block-level Dell SAN, but the S7000 gives you some really cool features like Flash SSDs, analytics, etc. You can also mirror them fairly easily and there's only one point of failure (the SAN) rather than two (the SAN and the Server). As I said, it all depends on what you're looking for and if the Dell SAN attached to a Windows server will cover your needs then go for it. Chris
richardp Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 Have you considered the new drobopro ? 8 diskbays, iscsi, dual disk redundancy ... The unit without disks is approx £850 ex vat then just add as many 2tb drives as you need. You can also remove all the installed disks as a disk pack which can then be stored off site.
SC-UK Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 Have you considered the new drobopro ? 8 diskbays, iscsi, dual disk redundancy ... The unit without disks is approx £850 ex vat then just add as many 2tb drives as you need. You can also remove all the installed disks as a disk pack which can then be stored off site. We have a Drobo (not the pro version) and can't rate them highly enough. You can stick any drives in, any manufacturer, size, anything and it just works. Very quick to rebuild after a failure and depending on the redundancy level set I think the pro can handle up to two simultaneous failures. Need confirmation on that one though!
richardp Posted July 30, 2009 Posted July 30, 2009 Yes the DroboPro by default uses a single drive for redundancy but by simply ticking a box will use two drives. I have ordered one to replace a dead hp tape autoloader (which was very expensive at the time), it was going to cost us approx £2500 to replace the tape drive plus approx another £1000 for new tapes as we could not get the same tape drive. So we went for a drobopro for £850 plus 4x 2Tb hard drives at £150 each so a total of approx £1500.This gives us 5.4Tb of usable space, plus we can add another 4 harddrives later on, especially when the price drops.
hotwired007 Posted July 31, 2009 Posted July 31, 2009 Is anyone using OpenFiler in anger ?? I'm starting to look around at SAN's for our college as storage is getting a problem & I've looked at the big boys like EMC, Hitachi & Equalogic / Dell but they are soooooo expensive. I realise that these solutions are very powerful but looking at OpenFiler I think it'll do everything I want such as iSCSI etc. If you are using it in anger what hardware are you running it on & what jobs is it doing ?? Thanks Brian I'm just in the implimentation stages atm but i'll be running a OpenFiler SAN hopefully by the end of the summer holidays - It'll be hosting all the schools servers and data. The hardware i'm using is (x2): HP Proliant ML115 Server Opteron 1532 (4x 2.1Ghz 512mb cache) Western Digital 80GB Drive (Boot) - I did try a 16GG USB Stick but couldn't get it to work 4x Western Digital 1TB RE3 Drives (RAID5) 1 Gigabit Ethernet (Onboard) 1x HP Dual Gigabit Ethernet card.
clodhopper Posted July 31, 2009 Author Posted July 31, 2009 Thanks for all the pointers, I'll have a look at the SUN stuff
linescanner Posted July 31, 2009 Posted July 31, 2009 Thanks for all the pointers, I'll have a look at the SUN stuff Give me a shout if you need any info on the Sun stuff.
john Posted July 31, 2009 Posted July 31, 2009 The Sun stuff is set to get better and better mate, trust me I looked at a HP SAN VS the Sun SAN and the HP was A slightly more expensive for the slightly less storage, and just doesn't have anywhere near the same features as the Sun does. You need to see what your missing out on to realise where the extra value added in the Sun is
john_robbo Posted August 1, 2009 Posted August 1, 2009 (edited) We've been running an OpenFiler box for about 8 months now, mainly as a backup for the stuff that won't fit onto tape any more. We've got it running on an HP DX2200 workstation with 2 x 1Tb mirrored drives. Its been absolutely brilliant, the only limit being the number of hard drives we can fit in the box! I've also just ordered a DroboPro and 8 x 1.5Tb HDDs - came to around £1500 - far cheaper than looking into new tape technology (as richardp mentions) and about the same cost as building a new Openfiler box. This should give us 9.36Tb usable capacity with single-disk redunancy or 8.17Tb with dual. I believe the Drobo's can also be chained together using "Smart Volumes" to give a maximum of 16 units, each with the potential of 16Tb capacity. I don't think I'd consider it as a replacement to an Enterprise-class storage device, but as a backup medium its looking very promising. Edited August 1, 2009 by john_robbo 1
john Posted August 1, 2009 Posted August 1, 2009 The Drobo sounds like it could be a good product for me to look into for backing up my shiny Sun SAN that Andy @ Cuter tells me will arrive next week
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