Cheapish iSCSI SAN

[Tallwood_6]

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.

 

Well my idea of a decent SAN is something like a Equallogic, Lefthand, Netapp, Sun Unified Storage Storage etc but prehaps i'm just a snob. But you are going to want something that primarily offers you the IOP's and speed required education environments are somewhat unique in that your regulary getting large number of users either logging on, saving or accessing the same file all at once. Space should be a secondary concern.

[Butuz]

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

 

Don't go by the RRP. Education gets big discounts. I am running 2 x 7110's here and I would not have been able to if it was not for the education discounts that linescanner on this forum got for me.

 

Butuz

[DMcCoy]

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

 

Same, VLAN just for storage, another for vmotion etc.

 

My HP Lefthand P4300G2 has a faulty node, as I discovered when I turned it on for the first time today. Thinks it's -7 air temp. Shuts down when the agent starts up

[tmcd35]

Personally I'd buy an off-the-shelf server that supports RAID 5/6/50/60 and 12+ SAS drives and build my own from their. Then I'd throw on a copy of FreeNAS or Openfiler. The biggest cost with SAN's and NAS's are the hard drives. If you need performance 12x 15krpm SAS disks ain't cheap. If it's for running VM's or storing user home drives then I'd be looking at 10krpm SATA disks as an absolute minimum (like the WD Raptors) but edging towards SAS if I could afford it. Also I'd looking at getting as meny drives/spindles as possible to help increase speed (rather than buying fewer higher capacity drives). Then using RAID 50 or 60 with 4 disk redundancy.

 

If you choose to build your own SAN then stay clear of HP server as, unless you can find a ready supply of HP HDD caddies, only HP HD's will fit in HP servers and they cost alot more.

 

My last box, which is 4Tb, cost me nigh on £8k to build and there was no way I could get similar spec from any off-the-shelf SAN solutions.

 

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.

Just read that. It's not supported - but it does work. 802.3ad requires 3rd party hardware support and 3rd party driver support. MS don't support 3rd party hardware or drivers.

Edited August 3, 2010 by tmcd35