SAN Solution

[Soulfish]

+1 on using a SAN/NAS unified system for file sharing. We've got a 7110 and an EMC Celerra NS-480 and both are great at file sharing, with full shadow copy support

[derriunr]

+1 for iSCSI

[CHiLL]

I've been talking to an Oracle rep on the phone. Going to get a call back at some point to go over our situation in more detail. I'll also ring around a few other companies too, to try and get a ballpark figure.

[linescanner]

I've been talking to an Oracle rep on the phone. Going to get a call back at some point to go over our situation in more detail. I'll also ring around a few other companies too, to try and get a ballpark figure.

 

Drop me a line if you need pricing. Can push for some extra discount.

[Butuz]

Cant get more educational discount than linescanner can get!! What a man!

 

Mind you it does look like Oracle are a fair bit tighter to Edu than Sun were?

 

Butuz

[gshaw]

Just been searching around old threads for SAN recommendations, having read some of the posts so far here's what I've looked at...

 

- NetApp... some nice features but pricey and slow core CPU (FAS2020)

- Oracle \ Sun... loved on here but might be a bit pricey for us and what we need?

- Hitachi... recommended to this recently, might do the job?

- Dothill... I see it around the same as Hitachi, maybe slightly more basic OEM type kit?

- IBM S7000... an interesting device that seems to be aimed at SMB deployments but very new and perhaps a bit unproven as yet

- HP Lefthand P4000... decent spec and might get good bid pricing but depends how it stacks up to the others

- Dell Equalogic... we don't really deal with Dell kit and being in the same price range as HP we'd stick with HP

- EMC... pricey!

 

We don't need bundles of storage, probably 2-3Tb would be plenty, I'm thinking a mix of SAS for the VMs and SATA for file shares, images etc? With shares I was thinking of either putting them on a unified storage SAN but if that means we have to go to an expensive model then I was looking at using two Server 2008 VMs clustered doing the file shares.

 

With servers for our virtualisation project I'm looking at 20-25k for the lot so the SAN is 10-15k of that based on the 3 x HP DL380s with 32GB RAM coming in at somewhere between 10-12k. I'm also allowing 1.5k for two decent ProCurves (2910s?) for the iSCSI SAN.

 

I'm not too worried about replication features as it stands as we only have the one site, although would be nice to have it there for the future. Paranoia says RAID6 to me for the file storage, dual controllers is a must etc. Also prefer options where we can add extra trays of disks as we go but not at massive cost (reading the NetApp experiences is another reason to be put off there!) Thin provisioning would be nice

 

Does that sound realistic (or indeed in reality could it come out cheaper, that would be a result!) and which of the above comes recommended in that price bracket?

Edited February 3, 2011 by gshaw

[teejay]

@gshaw

How many users and how many client computers do you have? How many servers are you looking at virtualising and what sort of things are they doing?

[Duke]

I'm still gonna recommend the S7000 stuff, but at 2-3TB you're really looking at the old 7110 which I don't think is available any more, you'd have to get the 7120. I think you can get the 7120 with just disks in the head - no disk trays - but still add disk trays at a later date if you wanted. Have you got a quote from Andy at Cutter (or WTL) for a 7120 in the size you need to compare the costs?

 

I've got 3x Dell R710s with 48GB RAM quoted at about £10.4k so your DL380 figures sound right. We don't use HP switches so not sure about those costs.

 

I think it all depends on your long-term plan, that's how we're selling it to management here. Everything needs to be expandable and upgradable at a later date, no point me buying things like the VMware Essentials bundle (which is great value for money) if I'm later going to want more than 3 VMware hosts and I'll have to re-buy all my licences because it's not expandable. If you're going for one of the cheaper SAN/NAS options then get something that will scale well. The FAS2020 will take extra disk shelves but with the Celeron it runs it's not worth it (I've got one!).

 

What's the HP SAN got in the way of features? Disk types (SSD/Flash accelerators, or does it use 15k SAS drives for speed?), what's the software stack on it like (particularly protocol-wise)? If you're HP already it might be a good option.

 

Chris

[gshaw]

@gshaw

How many users and how many client computers do you have? How many servers are you looking at virtualising and what sort of things are they doing?

 

300 PCs

About the same amount of users in the building on PCs at any time (some staff using OWA and in the future TS RemoteApp etc)

 

Currently 15 servers over 2 networks being consolidated to a single network with VLANs over summer. DC \ DHCP \ DNS \ SCCM \ SQL 2005 (for MIS) \ WSS 3.0 \ Exchange 2007 (might upgrade to 2010) \ print servers plus probably a few new VMs for minor applications e.g. ID card system and so on. File server is currently a Windows Storage Server but I'm not having shares on a single Windows box again, if it stays Windows it will be clustered to avoid host OS issues.

 

The other option is this...

 

http://www.intelmodularserver.com/

 

Switches won't be a problem, about 800ish for 2910s if I'm right although that should drop a bit with educational bid pricing

 

The virtualisation software is still up for debate, VMWare is my gut instinct but Hyper-V R2 + DPM 2010 saves enough on licensing to get the Ruckus wireless kit I've been after for the last year or so. What I worry is that it will come at a cost, that being the cost of me tearing hair out if Windows has a wobbly and doesn't fail over correctly.

 

The only reason I haven't already gone to Cutter is that I have a feeling they won't be on our Borough approved suppliers list, if anyone from the company sees this give me a PM to check...

Edited February 3, 2011 by gshaw

[Dos_Box]

Switches won't be a problem, about 800ish for 2910s if I'm right although that should drop a bit with educational bid pricing

 

10/100 Switches fro £800. Cisco really live in the 1990's don't they. Personally i wouldn't go anywhere near Cisco kit these days. I'll bet net-Ctlr would give better pricing on Juniper kit!

[gshaw]

10/100 Switches fro £800. Cisco really live in the 1990's don't they. Personally i wouldn't go anywhere near Cisco kit these days. I'll bet net-Ctlr would give better pricing on Juniper kit!

 

Noo this is a Gigabit Procurve, originally thought a 2810 but read somewhere that a 2910 was recommended for iSCSI (though that said another place went with v1910s which is completely the other end of the scale)

 

Quite annoying that HP have gone and changed the numbers on their kit, never seems to stay the same from one day to the next these days

[Duke]

Hmm, this was just posted on The Register: SAN vs NAS: Spelling out the differences

 

Fibre Channel over Ethernet looks set to become the de facto standard for storage over the next decade.

 

Really, says who? Who is currently using it and what for - except for those wishing to migrate from Fibre Channel to Ethernet-based protocols? If you need bandwidth and aren't running FC then you've probably got 10Gbe kit already, and if so why wouldn't you go iSCSI? FCoE was big news when it was first announced but I've heard very little about it since, maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

 

EDIT: Nope, not just me:

 

Data center fabric convergence: Many take the iSCSI route

FCoE is not ready but iSCSI is, so what’s the deal?

 

However, if you need to choose between SAN and NAS, the key difference to focus on is whether or not you need the top performance and reliability of a SAN and are prepared to pay the premium. If not, you need a NAS.

 

What? Why should there be any difference in performance and reliability between a SAN and a NAS? If you're running unified storage then you've got SAN+NAS on the same hardware and your reliability should be the same - arguably NAS will be more reliable because clients directly access the storage rather than going through another server which accesses that storage, so there's one less point of failure. Also, with modern storage, a proper NAS is likely to cost just as much as a SAN because you'll be paying for CIFS/SMB, NFS, HTTP, FTP, etc. licences, rather than just an iSCSI licence for SAN. Finally, why on earth would my choice between a SAN or NAS come down to whether I'm willing to 'pay the premium'? Surely the only deciding factor should be whether I want file-level or block-level access?

 

/rant

 

*grumbles and goes back to work*

Edited February 4, 2011 by Duke

[SYNACK]

What? Why should there be any difference in performance and reliability between a SAN and a NAS? If you're running unified storage then you've got SAN+NAS on the same hardware and your reliability should be the same - arguably NAS will be more reliable because clients directly access the storage rather than going through another server which accesses that storage, so there's one less point of failure. Also, with modern storage, a proper NAS is likely to cost just as much as a SAN because you'll be paying for CIFS/SMB, NFS, HTTP, FTP, etc. licences, rather than just an iSCSI licence for SAN. Finally, why on earth would my choice between a SAN or NAS come down to whether I'm willing to 'pay the premium'? Surely the only deciding factor should be whether I want file-level or block-level access?

/rant

 

*grumbles and goes back to work*

 

Performance to the server rather than to the client, block level SAN to the server will be much faster for local ops and shareing out from the server than a NAS. Sure if you are looking from the NAS out to the client it may be a diferent story depending on the gear but for the server to storage comms block level is going to be quicker which is what they were trying to get across I think.

[Duke]

Performance to the server rather than to the client, block level SAN to the server will be much faster for local ops and shareing out from the server than a NAS. Sure if you are looking from the NAS out to the client it may be a diferent story depending on the gear but for the server to storage comms block level is going to be quicker which is what they were trying to get across I think.

 

Yeah, that makes sense. If I was doing SQL or Exchange on remote storage then it'd be via an iSCSI LUN rather than file-level. Still not convinced of their whole argument about a SAN being definitively better performance/reliability and higher cost than a NAS without some context though.

 

Time for a holiday.

[SimonF]

NAS starts at circa £50 in PC World - so I can see some logic in the statement NAS is cheap. You certainly dont get SANs for £50. This is missing the point - which is as you share data with more servers/ users - so the storage becomes more critical and needs to be more resilient, higher performance and probably more scalable. Whether SAN or NAS - you gets what you pay for.

[Geoff_Smith]

 

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Dos_Box

Edited March 3, 2011 by Dos_Box

[rbance]

Have a look at the Thecus range...cheap and do ISCSI and NFS..suitable for VMWARE...also support 10GB modules...Use SATA and SAS disks....

 

 

if you want higher end...have a look at the IBM XIV solutions...Used this for a 4500 user VDI deployment.......

[CHiLL]

I want to apologise for being inactive in this thread. I've been bogged down trying to help get Windows 7 working as a mandatory profile in a mixed XP/7 and 2003/2008 environment. It hasn't been easy.

 

This project was put on the back burners because of Windows 7, and has subsequently been cancelled due to a lack of funding. Oracle were seemingly the leading choice though.

[rbance]

I'm pretty new to all this, so I'd like some advice on SANs. We are debating whether to implement a SAN into our network. W have several file servers across the site, which are nearly full of data. We'd like a central storage solution, so we can use our servers just for applications, rather than that and file shares.

 

All of our network equipment is HP, provided by Zentek, and HP do SAN solutions, so they're the ones that are drawing our eyes at the moment. However, I don't know of any decent other solutions from other companies.

 

Ideally, we'd like the chassis and a customisable amount of hard drives. I've noticed HP's solutions are including the drives as well as the chassis. Such as 7TB over 42 drives. What if we don't want to use all the 42 drives? We don't want to pay for them all. Having less, a more tailored solution, would allow for scalability in the future.

 

I don't know much about SAN connectivity, from the little I've researched, a full Fibre connection would be best for us I think.

 

How equipment would we need to purchase as well as the actual SAN to get it up and running? Or is it simply a case of buying a SAN, buying and fitting a fibre connection to the nominated server and that's it for the hardware?

 

I've probably forgot some other questions I had, so I may come back with random questions. I have read some of the other relevant threads made about SANs in the past year, but with my lack of knowledge on the subject, I'm not really understanding it.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Not sure if anyone commented on the 42disks and the advantages, but having more disk like you have stated actually gives you very good I/O for your storage....this is particularly useful for database applications.....