Cheapish iSCSI SAN

[skell]

Hi guys

 

Could anyone recommend me a cheap(ish) iSCSI SAN? We're looking to run around 10 Hyper-V VM's off it as well as using it for general storage access for students and staff. 4 TB of storage would be the absolute minimum. Probably a budget of £4000.

 

Thanks!

[jamesreedersmith]

Openfiler

[localzuk]

Look at Overland storage or Drobo. Both are well priced. I have some Overland storage stuff at work here, and it is pretty solid.

[skell]

@localzuk

 

What spec is your Overland kit and do you run any VM's off it?

[localzuk]

We have a SnapServer 520 - but we bought it when SnapServers were still Adaptec.

 

Can't really comment on the VM side of things - we don't use it for that, and it is now 3 or so years old, so is a bit out of date compared with their latest offerings.

[teejay]

Anything with lots of disks in it work s pretty well for iSCSI. One thing to be careful of is that you have a really good switch sitting in between your vm servers and the iSCSI box, this is something it's well worth spending some money on. I'm a big HP Procurve fan, but for this role I really would recommend a Cisco as you've got much more control over link aggregation.

[AngryTechnician]

For this role I really would recommend a Cisco as you've got much more control over link aggregation.

 

It's worth noting that Microsoft does not support link aggregation in Hyper-V environments. In particular, they recommend MPIO for iSCSI instead of using link aggregation on the network hardware.

 

I've just recently taken delivery of a Dell PowerVault which runs Windows Storage Server. iSCSI and general storage, have 6TB of disks in a RAID5 array in there and it cost me just under £4k. I haven't had it long enough to give it a wholehearted thumbs up (my last iSCSI choice took a few months to bite me on the ass) but so far, I'm liking it. My favourite feature of the week is the built-in ability to set file type restriction policies on particular folders... no more saving .exe files to pupils' My Documents!

Edited July 30, 2010 by AngryTechnician

[denon101]

I've just recently taken delivery of a Dell PowerVault which runs Windows Storage Server. iSCSI and general storage, have 6TB of disks in a RAID5 array in there and it cost me just under £4k. I haven't had it long enough to give it a wholehearted thumbs up (my last iSCSI choice took a few months to bite me on the ass) but so far, I'm liking it. My favourite feature of the week is the built-in ability to set file type restriction policies on particular folders... no more saving .exe files to pupils' My Documents!

 

Can you give me some information regarding the specification of the PowerVault system. I am looking for something and what you have bought sounds exactly what I need.

 

Thanks

[srowland]

Edited due to unauthorised advertising.

 

Please note you may not use the forums in a commercial capacity unless you are a sponsor, as per the sign up AUP. If you want details on this please contact us.

 

Dos_Box

Edited August 2, 2010 by Dos_Box

[AngryTechnician]

Can you give me some information regarding the specification of the PowerVault system. I am looking for something and what you have bought sounds exactly what I need.

Not sure exactly what sort of info you're after, but this is the Dell product page for the model I purchased:

 

PowerVault NX3000 Network-Attached Storage Details | Dell

 

P.S. Sadly I'm not on commission from Dell so hopefully this is OK with the advertising rules.

Edited August 2, 2010 by AngryTechnician

[plexer]

Whatever you buy make sure it has good backup in the event of anything going wrong unless you have the time to spend on doing it yourself with spares on hand.

 

If it's mission critical then don't scrimp.

 

We purchased a custom built SAN/NAS from SCL and it's been not working for longer that it has worked, the latest they did to it was fit a new set of drives along with a hardware raid card and I had shelled out for some additional software when we felt openfiler wasn't cutting it and the thing still doesn't work as expected.

 

So thats just short of £4k we wasted on that.

 

I'll be looking at getting legal on to it in September.

 

Ben

[ryman]

Post edited. You have just joined and have recommended React in your only two posts, this comes only a couple of hours after I have warned off React about using this forum for commercial purposes. I shall be making some quite angry phone calls in the morning.

 

Dos_Box

Edited August 2, 2010 by Dos_Box

[Tallwood_6]

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

[nicholab]

You can use an dual controller MSA 60 for a two host VM environment this will scale up to 24TB.

[DMcCoy]

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

 

If you have a sufficient core switch (with the servers also plugged into it) then I really don't see a need to buy additional switches for iscsi. I did with fibre channel because I *had* to, but today I've just plugged a new iscsi SAN into the core switch. HP 2500s are a bit on the weedy side too, you'd be better off with the 2900s.

[Dos_Box]

To be honest i wouldnt risk running most of my infrastructure of a £4000 SAN, presumably this cost has also got to include the cost of some iscsi switches as well which is going to set you back £900 odd for say two 2510-24G Procurves which isnt going to leave you much at all for a SAN which is going to give you the performance and redundancy you need. Do you have anything to backup all this data to or indeed licences for some backup software that will take VM backups etc the cost can add up.

 

Why not? Many people here do (I used to), and TBH, peopel running SANs very rarely, if ever, have major problems, and you don't have to have dedicated switches if you don't want.

[Butuz]

4tb version of the Sun 7110 should sort you out niceley!!!

 

Butuz

[Tallwood_6]

We are assuming however that he has

1.) A decent core switch to run the iscsi traffic over and juddging by the ammount of money spent on the SAN this looks doubtful.

2.) He doesnt have to purchase additional licences for OS/ Backup software management etc.

3.) He already has some means to backup all this extra storage.

4.) We also dont know the IOP's requirements for the VM's in question and the number of stations and users is being supported.

With this in mind £4k isnt alot to work with.

[localzuk]

4tb version of the Sun 7110 should sort you out niceley!!!

 

Butuz

 

Not for less than £4k it won't, from what I've seen of pricing.

[Dos_Box]

We are assuming however that he has

1.) A decent core switch to run the iscsi traffic over and juddging by the ammount of money spent on the SAN this looks doubtful.

2.) He doesnt have to purchase additional licences for OS/ Backup software management etc.

3.) He already has some means to backup all this extra storage.

4.) We also dont know the IOP's requirements for the VM's in question and the number of stations and users is being supported.

With this in mind £4k isnt alot to work with.

 

1. Again, you don't have to run it over your core switch. Many (as I did) just got a decent GB managed switch which the servers plugged directly into. An virtual servers running from the SAN have their traffic sent via the host anyway.

2. That would be a requirement for nay network expansion, but using the Enterprise versions of Windows you get the extra VM cals included anyway, and backup software can be transferred and any extra licences would have had to be purchased in the course of an expansion.

3. D2D Is cheap and SANs are increadibly realiable.

4. I'm pretty sure the OP has factored this in.

[Tallwood_6]

Again though we dont know what hes factored into the cost so until he comes back and confirms the scope of what he needs we are just making assumptions.

[Dos_Box]

But surely he is merely asking for options from which he can look into to base his desision from?

[skell]

But surely he is merely asking for options from which he can look into to base his desision from?

 

I am. I realise £4k isn't much to work with, but I figured it might be a good starting point. SAN is new territory for me so I'm not sure what I should be looking for, or its even possible to find a solution capable of what we would like it to do!

 

@Tallwood_6 If you don't think £4k is enough, please let me know what we would need to spend on a capable SAN solution for our needs. To answer some of your questions, the whole budget would be going on the SAN; we have already set aside money for operating systems, backup solutions etc. We'll be buying extra storage capacity for backups and an extra gigabyte switch with a fibre link to the rest of our network.

[diggory]

Look at Overland storage or Drobo. Both are well priced. I have some Overland storage stuff at work here, and it is pretty solid.

 

I wouldn't recommend a drobo to run vms off. Our drobo pro is too slow to run more than 2 vms.

Ours has a nasty habit of going into power saving after a month or so.

Openfiler is ok, fairly stable, however if you are running multiple servers you'll want something nice and solid.

So redundant PSUs, and controllers are a must (and RAID naturally).

You should be able to pick up a decent SAN for under £4000.

I think our IBM DS3300 wasn't too much. We used our existing server disks (watch out for vendor disk lock in - we had to use IBM disks...)

 

Dell do some nice SANs, which have nifty features.

Also people recommend the SUN SANs too.

SANs only get very expensive if you start using replication between SANs or really fast SAS disks.

If you uses a lot of SATA disks you should be able to get enough speed for a few servers - watch your RAID levels

Another problem with drobo, is that it doesn't have PSU or controller redundancy.

[AngryTechnician]

today I've just plugged a new iscsi SAN into the core switch.

I do the same, though I set up a separate VLAN for the iSCSI connections that doesn't talk to anything else.