Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

Bob Morales: Aug 18, 2006; HYPER-THREADING

tronester posted:

Is it possible to purchase a loaded storage array for an iSCSI SAN at less than 5000 dollars for 1-2TB of usable space?

My client needs just that, to function as a storage platform for vSphere. They are limited to 5000 dollars by government red tape (otherwise they are looking at 4-6 months for a lengthy approval process) Pretty much anything decent ive seen starts at $10K.

Would loading OpenFiler on a Dell (or whitebox) server do the trick? Cram 4-6 1TB HD's in there.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 17:42

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# ? May 19, 2013 05:49

nexxai: Jul 17, 2002; quack quack bjork

tronester posted:

Is it possible to purchase a loaded storage array for an iSCSI SAN at less than 5000 dollars for 1-2TB of usable space?

My client needs just that, to function as a storage platform for vSphere. They are limited to 5000 dollars by government red tape (otherwise they are looking at 4-6 months for a lengthy approval process) Pretty much anything decent ive seen starts at $10K.

It's been a while since I checked out their site but Cybernetics has always had crazy good pricing on iSCSI SANs. While we didn't end up going with them (our CFO wanted to stay all within one brand, for our server/storage refresh; there was nothing technically wrong with their products) they undercut Dell by nearly 75%. They had a 16TB array for something crazy like $9k. I'm sure if you talk to them, you'll be able to find something in your price range.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 17:44

tronester: Aug 12, 2004; People hear what they want to hear.

Bob Morales posted:

Would loading OpenFiler on a Dell (or whitebox) server do the trick? Cram 4-6 1TB HD's in there.

That's actually something I've considered.

They have a ton of hp dl360 g5s that aren't being used since we virtualized most of their infrastructure.

However is openfiler or Freenas a viable option for enterprise? I don't have any experience with either but could certainly learn.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 17:49

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005; OFFICIAL BITCH OF DANBO DAXTER

So I've been playing around with our new VNX 5300 and it's replication partner, and let me just say man this has been quite an experience. Coming from an Equallogic box, and not having a storage admin, it is not nearly as kiddy-proof. I'd be more excited about it if I did not have 5 million other things going on (Setup our SAN ASAP! Fix this person's printer ASAP!)

I was running the VNX Initialization Assistant and it got to the point where it set an IP address and hostname and then bombed out. Apparently there is no way to reset the Control Station (or reinstall the OS on it), without them sending out a tech, so that you can run the VIA again, it all has to be done manually.

The support has been hit or miss. Have had a hard time getting a hold of anyone in their support chat who knows anything, and they supposedly "dispatched a tech" over 48 hours ago, but we were able to get it working and are now updating the firmware.

It definitely seems like these SANs were build from the bottom up, with dozens of little tools and separate interfaces, which is very different from the Equallogic side of things. I am very excited to put it through it's paces and then put it in production, though.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 17:49

Misogynist: Jul 14, 2003; hubthumping

tronester posted:

That's actually something I've considered.

They have a ton of hp dl360 g5s that aren't being used since we virtualized most of their infrastructure.

However is openfiler or Freenas a viable option for enterprise? I don't have any experience with either but could certainly learn.

Openfiler or FreeNAS isn't nearly as much of an issue as the fact that cramming a handful of SATA disks into some enclosure is not going to give you nearly enough IOPS to support even a lightly used vSphere environment. The actual distributions themselves aren't awful, but trying to set up OpenFiler replication if you're not already a Linux wizard is an exercise in futility.

Also keep in mind that the iSCSI targets used by OpenFiler, FreeNAS and basically any NAS distribution other than Nexenta will not be able to support shared disk clustering of Windows servers using MSCS. This may not be an issue for your environment, though.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 17:55

xarph: Jun 18, 2001; The rules of the game are impenetrable and the result is always contested.

Misogynist posted:

Openfiler or FreeNAS isn't nearly as much of an issue as the fact that cramming a handful of SATA disks into some enclosure is not going to give you nearly enough IOPS to support even a lightly used vSphere environment.

How many spindles do you think would be necessary for about 50-60 lightly used VMs? Would an enclosure with 12 in raid6+hot spare cut it? I'm going to try to set it up as a science experiment anyway, but knowing whether I should be disappointed in advance would be helpful.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 19:05

Spamtron7000: Oct 15, 2003; Nobody makes me bleed my own blood.

tronester posted:

Is it possible to purchase a loaded storage array for an iSCSI SAN at less than 5000 dollars for 1-2TB of usable space?

My client needs just that, to function as a storage platform for vSphere. They are limited to 5000 dollars by government red tape (otherwise they are looking at 4-6 months for a lengthy approval process) Pretty much anything decent ive seen starts at $10K.

Drobo? 8TB iSCSI at a $4,999 list.

http://www.drobostore.com/store/dro...uctID.233947000

# ? Nov 3, 2011 19:11

qutius: Apr 2, 2003; NO PARTIES

Internet Explorer posted:

The support has been hit or miss. Have had a hard time getting a hold of anyone in their support chat who knows anything, and they supposedly "dispatched a tech" over 48 hours ago, but we were able to get it working and are now updating the firmware.

It definitely seems like these SANs were build from the bottom up, with dozens of little tools and separate interfaces, which is very different from the Equallogic side of things. I am very excited to put it through it's paces and then put it in production, though.

This has been our feedback to EMC as well, both on their rather awful support and the interfaces/tools used to manage their arrays. They may have a ton of market share and solid architecture, but they are far behind in those two areas IMO.

It's nice to have an ear direct into their engineering teams to give feedback on their UI, hopefully they are able to make some progress.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 19:13

optikalus: Apr 17, 2008

xarph posted:

How many spindles do you think would be necessary for about 50-60 lightly used VMs? Would an enclosure with 12 in raid6+hot spare cut it? I'm going to try to set it up as a science experiment anyway, but knowing whether I should be disappointed in advance would be helpful.

IOPS is calculated based on the drive's characteristics (RPM, avg seek time) not the number of spindles in an array. You could get the same IOPS with half the drives if you use 15k RPM SAS vs 7200 RPM SATA.

Generally, 7200 RPM SATA drives give ~80 IOPS; ~120 IOPS for 10K, and ~180 for 15K drives. Obviously different drives and busses will perform slightly differently, but those generalizations have been pretty consistent with my own tests on a bunch of different drives over the years.

You need to find out how many IOPS your VMs will require, then plan for that with the disk appropriately.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 19:48

tronester: Aug 12, 2004; People hear what they want to hear.

Misogynist posted:

Openfiler or FreeNAS isn't nearly as much of an issue as the fact that cramming a handful of SATA disks into some enclosure is not going to give you nearly enough IOPS to support even a lightly used vSphere environment. The actual distributions themselves aren't awful, but trying to set up OpenFiler replication if you're not already a Linux wizard is an exercise in futility.

Also keep in mind that the iSCSI targets used by OpenFiler, FreeNAS and basically any NAS distribution other than Nexenta will not be able to support shared disk clustering of Windows servers using MSCS. This may not be an issue for your environment, though.

Well luckily the HP proliants have SAS controllers, and will be equipped with 6 2.5" 300GB 10k rpm SAS drives. I honestly believe that they would have enough IOPS for their relatively light workload.

They do not use shared disk clustering.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 20:59

three: Aug 9, 2007

tronester posted:

Well luckily the HP proliants have SAS controllers, and will be equipped with 6 2.5" 300GB 10k rpm SAS drives. I honestly believe that they would have enough IOPS for their relatively light workload.

They do not use shared disk clustering.

Why does anyone every purchase 10K RPM drives? 2/3 of the performance for 9/10ths of the price.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 21:40

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget

xarph posted:

How many spindles do you think would be necessary for about 50-60 lightly used VMs? Would an enclosure with 12 in raid6+hot spare cut it? I'm going to try to set it up as a science experiment anyway, but knowing whether I should be disappointed in advance would be helpful.

use openindiana with an SSD ZIL, 16GB of RAM, and a second SSD for additional cache. if you have a single dl380g6 laying around you can do this with 6 disks in raidz2 (raid6) plus the two SSDs for under $5k and get phenomenol performance. Additionally, you can make use of copy on write snapshots and snapshot based replication to another box running openindiana (or freebsd).

# ? Nov 3, 2011 22:23

tronester: Aug 12, 2004; People hear what they want to hear.

three posted:

Why does anyone every purchase 10K RPM drives? 2/3 of the performance for 9/10ths of the price.

Versus a 15k rpm drive? They don't offer any with that spindle speed with at least 300 gb capacity.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 22:46

Misogynist: Jul 14, 2003; hubthumping

three posted:

Why does anyone every purchase 10K RPM drives? 2/3 of the performance for 9/10ths of the price.

You probably missed the part about them being 2.5". When you keep that criterion in mind, 15K drives are not 11% more expensive.

# ? Nov 3, 2011 22:56

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

Internet Explorer posted:

So I've been playing around with our new VNX 5300 and it's replication partner, and let me just say man this has been quite an experience. Coming from an Equallogic box, and not having a storage admin, it is not nearly as kiddy-proof. I'd be more excited about it if I did not have 5 million other things going on (Setup our SAN ASAP! Fix this person's printer ASAP!)

I was running the VNX Initialization Assistant and it got to the point where it set an IP address and hostname and then bombed out. Apparently there is no way to reset the Control Station (or reinstall the OS on it), without them sending out a tech, so that you can run the VIA again, it all has to be done manually.

The support has been hit or miss. Have had a hard time getting a hold of anyone in their support chat who knows anything, and they supposedly "dispatched a tech" over 48 hours ago, but we were able to get it working and are now updating the firmware.

It definitely seems like these SANs were build from the bottom up, with dozens of little tools and separate interfaces, which is very different from the Equallogic side of things. I am very excited to put it through it's paces and then put it in production, though.

Hey, did you get it up and running yet?

# ? Nov 9, 2011 07:58

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005; OFFICIAL BITCH OF DANBO DAXTER

Vanilla posted:

Hey, did you get it up and running yet?

Yes, I did, thank you. Although it's not in production yet. Appreciate all the help. Going to try to work on it some more today.

We purchased the Data Mover to do NFS and CIFs. It has the two blades with 4 ethernet ports each. I want to put the CIFS on one subnet and the NFS on another. One thing I noticed is that the blades are not active/active, unless I am missing something. One has to be dedicated as a standby or if one goes down everything comes down with it.

# ? Nov 9, 2011 14:34

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

Internet Explorer posted:

Yes, I did, thank you. Although it's not in production yet. Appreciate all the help. Going to try to work on it some more today.

We purchased the Data Mover to do NFS and CIFs. It has the two blades with 4 ethernet ports each. I want to put the CIFS on one subnet and the NFS on another. One thing I noticed is that the blades are not active/active, unless I am missing something. One has to be dedicated as a standby or if one goes down everything comes down with it.

Yes, the blades are active / passive but you can have up to eight of them depending on the model of array. One is waiting to take over in the event of a failure, just means you're not operatin gon half steam - you have a full blade taking over from the failed one.

You'll find one will easily handle the workload, I think each one is rated to host up to 256TB of file data.

# ? Nov 9, 2011 20:38

Wompa164: Jul 19, 2001; Don't write ghouls.

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to post this, but heregoes.

I've got about 6TB of personal data that I would like to back up to tape, on either LTO4 or LTO5. I don't own a capable tape drive but through my office I have access to a capable controller card and a copy of Kroll OnTrack.

Does anyone have suggestions for possibly renting an LTO4 or 5 drive? I'd only need it to create a backup set of my data so purchasing it doesn't make much sense to me.

# ? Nov 11, 2011 15:51

Misogynist: Jul 14, 2003; hubthumping

Wompa164 posted:

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to post this, but heregoes.

I've got about 6TB of personal data that I would like to back up to tape, on either LTO4 or LTO5. I don't own a capable tape drive but through my office I have access to a capable controller card and a copy of Kroll OnTrack.

Does anyone have suggestions for possibly renting an LTO4 or 5 drive? I'd only need it to create a backup set of my data so purchasing it doesn't make much sense to me.

This seems kind of silly, given that you have no way of periodically testing your backups to see if they even still work.

# ? Nov 11, 2011 16:54

Erwin: Feb 17, 2006

Wompa164 posted:

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to post this, but heregoes.

I've got about 6TB of personal data that I would like to back up to tape, on either LTO4 or LTO5. I don't own a capable tape drive but through my office I have access to a capable controller card and a copy of Kroll OnTrack.

Does anyone have suggestions for possibly renting an LTO4 or 5 drive? I'd only need it to create a backup set of my data so purchasing it doesn't make much sense to me.

Yeah, this is a little weird. But, probably the easiest thing to do would be to buy one on eBay, then when you're done with it, sell it on eBay. It's not like it'll depreciate that fast, so if you're patient, you can probably turn a small profit.

Or just buy 12TB of hard drives or something.

# ? Nov 11, 2011 16:59

Wompa164: Jul 19, 2001; Don't write ghouls.

Misogynist posted:

This seems kind of silly, given that you have no way of periodically testing your backups to see if they even still work.

I have the data backed up currently, chopped up across 5 individual 1TB disks, which is fine. However I'd rather backup the entire volume contiguously across tapes, which are much cheaper than keeping drives anyways. It is weird, you're right, but I feel weirder keeping 1TB disks sitting in my closet.

# ? Nov 11, 2011 17:29

sanchez: Feb 26, 2003

LTO tapes are not cheap, remember your filez will probably not compress very well, which means you'll fit 800gb on a $30 LTO4 tape. Compare that to a pre-madness $80 2tb hard drive..

# ? Nov 11, 2011 17:35

Wompa164: Jul 19, 2001; Don't write ghouls.

sanchez posted:

LTO tapes are not cheap, remember your filez will probably not compress very well, which means you'll fit 800gb on a $30 LTO4 tape. Compare that to a pre-madness $80 2tb hard drive..

I hear you. I'm just a home user with an enterprise soul..

# ? Nov 11, 2011 17:38

hackedaccount: Sep 28, 2009

Would some type of logical volume manager to concatenate the disks work?

# ? Nov 11, 2011 22:13

Wompa164: Jul 19, 2001; Don't write ghouls.

Yeah that's a great suggestion as well. Do you have a particular solution mind?

# ? Nov 12, 2011 00:31

Serfer: Mar 10, 2003; ...I like the way they think

Things that are pissing me off: EMC.

I don't know what happened in the last six months, but their support has been absolute poo poo recently. Nevermind that the NX4's that we have keep throwing up errors for a successful sector reconstruction, but when they throw out an unrecoverable sector error, EMC requests 8 or so sets of SPCollects (log dumps, drive status, etc), accuses me of creating several of the collects before the error happened (why the hell would I do that?) and then determining that because none of the drives had faulted everything was fine.

After about 18 or 20 of those, they finally get out to replace the drive, and replace it with a bad drive. Try again next day, finally get a working drive, yay. Flash forward a week, and something tries to read off the unreconstructable errors, causing the controller to crash, so the other controller takes over, tries to read the same thing, and crashes. Why didn't they mark these sectors as a part of the replacement? Good question. It caused nearly 18 hours of downtime for one of our offices, and two weeks later, I still can't get them to give me an explanation of why they didn't do anything.

Add that to the fact that they're continuing their "three years and your platform is dead, time to buy again brand new!" system, and the Compellent pitch we just got this week is looking mighty good. Their hardware lasts through revisions, they keep them upgraded, adding new technologies just means adding a card, mixed drive types, tiering, virtualized RAID, they seem to be hitting every sore spot that we're having with EMC. It almost seems too good to be true. Their price is more than we would like, but I'm not dumb, I know we would eventually spend as much on EMC, and then spend more three years later to replace it all.

Does anyone have any experiences that would break the magic spell Compellent has put on me?

# ? Nov 12, 2011 01:19

hackedaccount: Sep 28, 2009

Wompa164 posted:

Yeah that's a great suggestion as well. Do you have a particular solution mind?

If you're using Windows it seems you want to create what they call a Dynamic Volume. To be honest I assume it works and it's easy etc etc but I've never used it and I'm sure the guys over in the Windows thread could help you with any problems.

If you're using Linux you can use the built in Logical Volume Manager (aka LVM aka LVM2) to concatenate and I'm sure the guys in the Linux thread wouldn't mind helping a bit.

Two potential gotchas:

1) If one of the drives fails the data is likely lost, but you can replace the drive, recreate the logical drive (wiping all other drives in the process) and create a new fresh backup. May or may not be a problem for you.

2) You mentioned storing drives in the closet. Some OSes are sensitive to device names and will crap out when they change. For example, say the first time you connect hard drive #1 to USB port #1, disconnect it and put it in the closet. Then, the 2nd time you connect hard drive #1 to USB port #2 and suddenly Windows thinks the logical volume is broke. I can tell you how to get around this problem in Linux but I have no idea how it works (or if it's even a problem) in Windows.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 01:36

markus876: Aug 18, 2002; I am a comedy trap.

hackedaccount posted:

2) You mentioned storing drives in the closet. Some OSes are sensitive to device names and will crap out when they change. For example, say the first time you connect hard drive #1 to USB port #1, disconnect it and put it in the closet. Then, the 2nd time you connect hard drive #1 to USB port #2 and suddenly Windows thinks the logical volume is broke. I can tell you how to get around this problem in Linux but I have no idea how it works (or if it's even a problem) in Windows.

If you setup the drives (or you can "upgrade" them into this state later without data loss) into what Windows called Dynamic drives I'm pretty sure you won't have this type of problem. I think it works similar to how it does in linux where there is a uuid or similar written to the beginning of the drive and the OS uses the uuid to determine information about the drive rather than the port it is plugged into.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 01:44

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

Serfer posted:

Things that are pissing me off: EMC.

I don't know what happened in the last six months, but their support has been absolute poo poo recently. Nevermind that the NX4's that we have keep throwing up errors for a successful sector reconstruction, but when they throw out an unrecoverable sector error, EMC requests 8 or so sets of SPCollects (log dumps, drive status, etc), accuses me of creating several of the collects before the error happened (why the hell would I do that?) and then determining that because none of the drives had faulted everything was fine.

After about 18 or 20 of those, they finally get out to replace the drive, and replace it with a bad drive. Try again next day, finally get a working drive, yay. Flash forward a week, and something tries to read off the unreconstructable errors, causing the controller to crash, so the other controller takes over, tries to read the same thing, and crashes. Why didn't they mark these sectors as a part of the replacement? Good question. It caused nearly 18 hours of downtime for one of our offices, and two weeks later, I still can't get them to give me an explanation of why they didn't do anything.

Add that to the fact that they're continuing their "three years and your platform is dead, time to buy again brand new!" system, and the Compellent pitch we just got this week is looking mighty good. Their hardware lasts through revisions, they keep them upgraded, adding new technologies just means adding a card, mixed drive types, tiering, virtualized RAID, they seem to be hitting every sore spot that we're having with EMC. It almost seems too good to be true. Their price is more than we would like, but I'm not dumb, I know we would eventually spend as much on EMC, and then spend more three years later to replace it all.

Does anyone have any experiences that would break the magic spell Compellent has put on me?

So speaking quite honestly an NX4 box is basically as low as it gets and is very old. Support is likely the same.

VNX support is much better, VMAX / Symmetrix support is a country mile beyond both of those. The VNX is a world away from the NX4 - the NX4 is from what, 2006?

Compellent is more VNX range so you're talking a different EMC ball game. With Compellent Dell are doing great but there is one teensy weensy problem with Compellent:

Compellent is still a 32 bit OS which means the maximum cache is 4GB. This is a 'welcome to 2003' roadblock for Compellent and likely offers so more cache than you use today. That's the kind of cookie that isn't going to get solved without a painful software upgrade and the usual 'buy a ton of memory'' offering (assuming you can upgrade a 32bit array to a 64 bit array - likely you are buying the last lemons off the truck).

Other arrays, such as the VNX and Netapp arrays can offer you far more cache on the controller and also through the use of SSD drives or PAM cards. These make a world of difference.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 09:00

evil_bunnY: Apr 2, 2003

Serfer posted:

Things that are pissing me off: EMC.

Does anyone have any experiences that would break the magic spell Compellent has put on me?

I've had some ex-colleagues install quite a few of those, and they've been pretty happy AFAIK.

Vanilla posted:

VNX support is much better, VMAX / Symmetrix support is a country mile beyond both of those. The VNX is a world away from the NX4 - the NX4 is from what, 2006?

As long as you're paying support that is no loving excuse though. poo poo like refusing to replace a drive then putting a bad one in (instead of just being there 9AM NBD with a tested unit) is just unacceptable.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 11:01

Bluecobra: Sep 11, 2001; The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Serfer posted:

Does anyone have any experiences that would break the magic spell Compellent has put on me?

In my experience, their support on Solaris is lovely. The last time I called Copilot about a Solaris 10 iSCSI problem, they told me to call "Solaris" for help. Also, when we had bought our first Compellent, the on-site engineer(s) couldn't figure out how to get iSCSI working on SUSE and restored to Googling for the solution. I ended up figuring it out on my own. Based on my anecdotal evidence, it seems like this product works best for Windows shops.

I should also mention that we had one of their lovely Supermicro controllers die in our London office and it took them 8 days to get a replacement controller in the office. This was with 24x7 priority onsite support. That being said, I don't think the product is that bad but is probably not very well suited for a Unix/Linux shops. We just had a bunch of unfortunate problems with it so now it is called the "Crapellent" around the office.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 14:36

three: Aug 9, 2007

Bluecobra posted:

In my experience, their support on Solaris is lovely. The last time I called Copilot about a Solaris 10 iSCSI problem, they told me to call "Solaris" for help. Also, when we had bought our first Compellent, the on-site engineer(s) couldn't figure out how to get iSCSI working on SUSE and restored to Googling for the solution. I ended up figuring it out on my own. Based on my anecdotal evidence, it seems like this product works best for Windows shops.

I should also mention that we had one of their lovely Supermicro controllers die in our London office and it took them 8 days to get a replacement controller in the office. This was with 24x7 priority onsite support. That being said, I don't think the product is that bad but is probably not very well suited for a Unix/Linux shops. We just had a bunch of unfortunate problems with it so now it is called the "Crapellent" around the office.

From my experience thus far, their support is terrible. Not to mention their install engineers are terrible since they all seem to be terribly trained for Compellent since they're Dell engineers now. The SAN is okay, but I'd still rather buy EqualLogic.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 17:41

Serfer: Mar 10, 2003; ...I like the way they think

Vanilla posted:

So speaking quite honestly an NX4 box is basically as low as it gets and is very old. Support is likely the same.

VNX support is much better, VMAX / Symmetrix support is a country mile beyond both of those. The VNX is a world away from the NX4 - the NX4 is from what, 2006?

The NX4 is actually from 2008, we purchased it in 2009. We're having similar support issues on our CX4 as well (which is the same level as the VNX). The real issue isn't that the units are old, the issue is that their support is just terrible. It wouldn't have made a difference if it was a VNX or a VNXe, not replacing a drive the first time it throws an unrecoverable error is just unforgivable. Causing nearly 18 hours of downtime is just the icing on the cake. Add in the other issue we've now run into three times with EMC, the replace entire system every three years problem, and it's just not worth the money to stay with them.

Also, Compellent can do SSD and tiering, I'm not sure where you saw they couldn't.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 20:45

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

Serfer posted:

The NX4 is actually from 2008, we purchased it in 2009. We're having similar support issues on our CX4 as well (which is the same level as the VNX). The real issue isn't that the units are old, the issue is that their support is just terrible. It wouldn't have made a difference if it was a VNX or a VNXe, not replacing a drive the first time it throws an unrecoverable error is just unforgivable. Causing nearly 18 hours of downtime is just the icing on the cake. Add in the other issue we've now run into three times with EMC, the replace entire system every three years problem, and it's just not worth the money to stay with them.

Also, Compellent can do SSD and tiering, I'm not sure where you saw they couldn't.

The support you've experienced is truly awful and I'd make sure EMC knew it. Let the rep know, also on any CSAT reports that come through.

Compellent can do SSD drives but the system cache is still stuck on 4GB. I think a medium size array is at about 24GB these days. They can't use the SSD drives as an extension of cache, only as a storage tier.

Not sure if it has improved but last time I was speaking to an admin of Compellent he was bitching that it takes about 5 days to promote data to a higher tier and over to days to demote data to a lower tier.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 21:12

Serfer: Mar 10, 2003; ...I like the way they think

Vanilla posted:

The support you've experienced is truly awful and I'd make sure EMC knew it. Let the rep know, also on any CSAT reports that come through.

Compellent can do SSD drives but the system cache is still stuck on 4GB. I think a medium size array is at about 24GB these days. They can't use the SSD drives as an extension of cache, only as a storage tier.

Not sure if it has improved but last time I was speaking to an admin of Compellent he was bitching that it takes about 5 days to promote data to a higher tier and over to days to demote data to a lower tier.

Hmm, yeah, but using it as tier 0 storage seems like it would be rather effective, even if it can't be used as cache.

Also, just got an alert from the NX4 I was complaining about, MORE UNCORRECTABLE ERRORS. Fuuuuuck.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 21:17

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

Serfer posted:

Hmm, yeah, but using it as tier 0 storage seems like it would be rather effective, even if it can't be used as cache.

Also, just got an alert from the NX4 I was complaining about, MORE UNCORRECTABLE ERRORS. Fuuuuuck.

Using SSD drives in any array is definately going to be effective but is not even in the same ball park as having a larger cache. I'm a massive fan of SSD drives as Cache (EMC Fast Cache) or even PAM cards (Netapp). The more cache the better when it comes to arrays.

With the VNX I can have up to 2TB of Cache by using the SSD drives. I would much rather have a load of SSD drives dedicated to array cache than a load of SSD drives being used as data. If I had a choice it would be SSD for cache every time (or both if I can get away with it). I put SSD drives as cache into every VNX that comes under my nose, with three 200GB SSD drives I can bump the cache to over 200GB which turns even the smallest array into a different beast.

Using SSD drives with automated tiering means that the data that requires the performance over time gets to go on the SSD drives. The problem is it doesn't help me react to bursts, batch processes, boot storms, etc. EMC arrays move the data around once a day in 1GB chunks, the Compellent array in 4-12 days (?!) and other arrays (typically in the enterprise space) can move it around in seconds or minutes. So in the mid range space you're still relying on that 4GB-36GB of cache to do a lot of the hard work and it's just not enough, given people are hanging tens or even hundreds of TB's of the controllers.

SSD drives as cache bumps my cache from, say, 24GB to 800GB. This is a massive, massive jump and because it's a cache it will benefit all of the applications on the array. It acts as a huge read and write buffer and keeps 800GB of the most commonly accessed data at hand. This means my drives are a lot less utilised and often you can opt for the 10k rather than the 15k drives because of this.

On the support side flag this to your account manager, let them know you've had a data down event and the EMC kit is not pleasing you.

# ? Nov 12, 2011 22:23

KS: Jun 10, 2003

If you're using Compellent's default recommended storage profile in a system with with SSD as tier 1, it's going to act as a write cache. All writes go to the top tier of storage in RAID 0+1. They get progressed down to lower tiers and rewritten as RAID-5 in the background. It does not, however, act like a read cache, except in the sense that recently written data will be on SSD...

Having experience now working with EMC VNXe, Hitachi AMS, HP EVA, and Compellent in large ESX environments, I don't think you can go wrong with the Compellent. I now have three of them. Replay Manager 6 killed my last few complaints about the system. I am excited to see where they go with dedupe and the 64-bit series 50 controllers, but even today it is fast and reliable.

I like to say that Compellent is 3PAR for people who care about costs. It's not quite there, but it's close.

KS fucked around with this message at Nov 13, 2011 around 00:27

# ? Nov 13, 2011 00:23

Vanilla: Feb 24, 2002; Hay guys what's going on in th

KS posted:

I like to say that Compellent is 3PAR for people who care about costs. It's not quite there, but it's close.

My experience with 3PAR is that it's good kit but I hear what you say about cost. Those things are costed at the very top of mid-range - almost into Enterprise with the VMAX/XP/USPV.

# ? Nov 13, 2011 00:38

Mierdaan: Sep 14, 2004

Vanilla posted:

Not sure if it has improved but last time I was speaking to an admin of Compellent he was bitching that it takes about 5 days to promote data to a higher tier and over to days to demote data to a lower tier.

Yeah I just sat in a room with Compellent people for 4 hours the other day and they said you can schedule moves like this overnight if you don't feel like waiting for Data Progression to work its magic.

# ? Nov 13, 2011 23:41

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# ? May 19, 2013 05:49

madsushi: Apr 19, 2009; Baller.

Vanilla posted:

The more cache the better when it comes to arrays.

Seconding this. Caching technology is robust and universally used, as every single storage vendor realizes how powerful and important caching is to delivering storage. If you're spending the $$$ on SSDs, you should put them where they'll see the most benefit, which is the cache.

# ? Nov 14, 2011 01:18

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