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lilbean
Oct 2, 2003

I'm scoping out a low-cost SAN to share between a couple database servers for an active-passive failover setup. They're Sun servers so I'm inclined to pickup something along the lines of the J4200. That'll suit my needs fairly well, and I don't need anything too high-caliber since it's for staging and testing databases. Anyone have experience with the J4000 line, or can anyone recommend something similar? It's basically going to come down to around 4K with a couple HBAs and full of 250 gigabyte disks.

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oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated
I've been looking at LeftHand and Equalogic both. Got both setup in my lab. Lefthand software appears more flexible, Equalogic seems more "rack-dense". Equalogic is a bit less expensive since Dell can discount quite a bit.

Both appear to work just fine. Lefthand in particular has flexclone type of technology, thin replication, well done thin provisioning, multi-target replicas and couple other things. Downside is that for redundancy you are looking at somewhat large number of boxes. On the other side, you are not wasting space on spare drives.

Equalogic offers better reliability in single SAN, and perhaps higher throughput (3GB per shelf vs 2GB for LeftHand). I think I/O is a bit higher per Equalogic controller as well, however, considering you would normally have 2 LeftHand shelves for each Equalogic controller, it's a wash.

Power/Cooling I am not sure about. Lefthand has more boxes but it is more efficient. Equalogic does offer 5500 series box with 48 drives in it which is great if you just need bunch of space (think Sun with it's x4500 series).

With Equalogic, if you lose the box, you lose all volumes striped across from it. Hence dual-controllers, dual everything pretty-much. You would basically have to fry the powersupply (so it short-circuits the system) or something. Lefthand system approach is much more flexible, they have multiple network RAID levels and if you lose one box, you are still good to go.

One thing I am not sure with Lefthand is how the SAN will handle itself if there is a power/network failure. With Equalogic, we had power pulled couple times in a lab while running VMware with Exchange 2007 CCR clusters inside, and everything came back just peachy. With LeftHand we are going to test this next week :).

Also, I think Equalogic will provide you better support then Lefthand, or at least I've had better support and responsiveness with Dell then HP (both premium support agreements, whatever the new Gold contract is called for Dell, and the HP equivalent).

Edit: One thing I forgot about Equalogic which kind of sucks is that they can't do multi-hop replicas or multi-target replicas. This sucks and means you can't replicate between say two DR sites and then do a separate snapshot/replica to tertiary "backup" storage. However, that said boxes appear very solid. I don't buy the BS about reliability on these. We've been running these things in a lab for 60 days now and have fairly decent VMware lab deployment on top of them. Seems fairly fast and very solid (and that's with constant switch drops and power interruptions due to it being a lab environment).

Intrepid00 posted:

Anyone have experiance with Lefthand boxes? We are looking to buy our fist SAN for our office. We currently have like 12 servers we are going to consildate (that, I've heard it too much) servers down to two. We are without a doubt going to use Hyper-v from MS. We use it now for development platforms and find it fast and relieable (as long as you don't put windows XP on it, :gonk: it just isn't aware enough and the disk and network I/O suffer. Windows 2003 and Windows 6 fly on it. )

LeftHand Networks NSM box

Intersting box. The more storage you add, the more performance you get. You have one storage pool that is striped across all of thier boxes. I've seen reviews where with one box they where maxing out at around 1k IOPs and after another was added and stripped between the boxes the IOPS where getting a litte more then 1.9K IOPs. More boxes, more power. The framed SANs as Equalogic and Lefthand like to call the Dell AX and m3000i's have a a realitvly low IOPs roof compared to the potential Lefthand is showing us and what other tech sites have confirmed. Now, we won't proably need the insane amount of IOPs they are showing us, but the future expansion their would be nice for what ever is thrown our way in the future.

Things that concern me that I will get to ask the guy tomorrow is if their snapshot manager will offhost backups so that the server being backed up with Symantec will not be moving the backup data through the lan ports, but instead the backup server mounting the snapshot volume and deleting it when done.

Equalogic

I've already seen some posts saying don't do it. Besides their hosed up priceing chart (Storage increase from one model to another that only adds 1k to the price if we do it ourselves costs 7k+ from them) I haven't seen any good reason why not to. It does have a controller cap that is a lot lower then lefthands, but even then I don't think we will hit it. I also don't get their retarded active/passive controller push. I'd rather get two seperate boxes witha single controller then and replicate with them.

What I'd like to know is how fault tolerance is handled with them. I know I can slap two leftboxes on the network (same with datacore) and if one fails, the other steps right up and picks up where the other left off. We plan on having this in place by the end of next year. The Equalogic guy was being more vague about it and it was touting they got better IOPs. Which as some people have pointed out is debatable. I'll find out more tomorrow because I also am getting a free lunch out of them. Depending on what they have to say we may or not go with them and if it is a no it will be their outlandish price climb that is more like a hockey stick if graphed out and instead of slope like the other vendors.

oblomov fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Dec 20, 2008

Chucklehead
Apr 14, 2004
I couldn't think of a custom title, so I got this piece of shit instead!
Wow you guys this is an awesome thread.

I have been working myself to death trying to research a proper SAN, and I am going to have some choice words to share with my asshat vendor partners.

We're a 1000 person organization and if I hadn't started asking questions we very quickly would have been sold an over priced FC solution based entirely on storage capacity.

I'm pretty sold on NetApp right now, feels like I just need to fill in the blanks in regards to sizing and specific features.

Any huge red flags about a NetApp filer? HP guys in town are trying to tell me NetApp is the devil.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Chucklehead posted:

Wow you guys this is an awesome thread.

I have been working myself to death trying to research a proper SAN, and I am going to have some choice words to share with my asshat vendor partners.

We're a 1000 person organization and if I hadn't started asking questions we very quickly would have been sold an over priced FC solution based entirely on storage capacity.

I'm pretty sold on NetApp right now, feels like I just need to fill in the blanks in regards to sizing and specific features.

Any huge red flags about a NetApp filer? HP guys in town are trying to tell me NetApp is the devil.

NetApp is solid. The reason I am looking at other stuff is because a few newer solutions are more flexible in both management and downtime perspective.

Keep in mind, NetApp is a dual controller (either in separate boxes or same chassis) cluster design with traditional fiber backbone running to the shelves (you can have multiple loops). Thus, you are facing downtime if you have to say remove a shelf in the middle of the loop or for a few other reasons.

There is nothing wrong with this design, but between a few frustrating sessions with NetApp support (usually they are very good) and downtime for maintenance, I started looking around. That said, I am not entirely sure there are better solutions. NetApp is good, and especially if you need to do not just SAN but also CIFS and NFS, it's really good.

Just be prepared for some CLI love, FilerView sucks and DFM/OpsManager are pricey and still not completely there compared to Equalogic/Lefthand.

IMO, HP is the devil :P.

Sock on a Fish
Jul 17, 2004

What if that thing I said?
My company has had great success with Isilon's offerings. Every time we need more space in our production system we just throw another node at it, easy peasy. I think we're somewhere near 16TB now. Isilon always sends a guy to install every node that we buy, even though the work involved in adding another node takes maybe a few minutes after you get it racked.

bmoyles
Feb 15, 2002

United Neckbeard Foundation of America
Fun Shoe
I was just about to praise Isilon as well. I wish they would market better, because they have a fantastic product. You can linearly scale performance and capacity independently of one another, all without downtime. Their new nodes do 200MBps (bytes, not bits) of throughput *per node*. Flexible NFS load balancing, CIFS support out of the box, snapshots, synchronization, 10Gbit Infiniband backend network, 4 gigs of cache made globally available per-node... drool.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

oblomov posted:

I've been looking at LeftHand and Equalogic both. Got both setup in my lab. Lefthand software appears more flexible, Equalogic seems more "rack-dense". Equalogic is a bit less expensive since Dell can discount quite a bit.

Equalogic box we found had 4x the maintance costs then lefthand. We also found Equalogic to cost a lot more, but you may be larger and Dell isn't dicking you on the price.

quote:

Both appear to work just fine. Lefthand in particular has flexclone type of technology, thin replication, well done thin provisioning, multi-target replicas and couple other things. Downside is that for redundancy you are looking at somewhat large number of boxes. On the other side, you are not wasting space on spare drives.

It would appear so as well to me that this is true. The one thing I did notice is that the Equalogic box will not do replication on the fly with two clusters always being eactly the same. The equalogic box will only do scheadule.

quote:

Equalogic offers better reliability in single SAN, and perhaps higher throughput (3GB per shelf vs 2GB for LeftHand). I think I/O is a bit higher per Equalogic controller as well, however, considering you would normally have 2 LeftHand shelves for each Equalogic controller, it's a wash.

The Lefthand boxes tend to have less drives and will not max out the 2GB limit of the equalogic box. I don't even thing the PS5000 will get above 2GB as well unless you are throwing SAS 15K RPM's at it.

quote:

Power/Cooling I am not sure about. Lefthand has more boxes but it is more efficient. Equalogic does offer 5500 series box with 48 drives in it which is great if you just need bunch of space (think Sun with it's x4500 series).

Agreed.

quote:

With Equalogic, if you lose the box, you lose all volumes striped across from it. Hence dual-controllers, dual everything pretty-much. You would basically have to fry the powersupply (so it short-circuits the system) or something. Lefthand system approach is much more flexible, they have multiple network RAID levels and if you lose one box, you are still good to go.

Agreed, which is something we like to have in case I don't know a black hole opens up in the server room and sucks the box into dimension X the other boxes still left will keep us up.

quote:

One thing I am not sure with Lefthand is how the SAN will handle itself if there is a power/network failure. With Equalogic, we had power pulled couple times in a lab while running VMware with Exchange 2007 CCR clusters inside, and everything came back just peachy. With LeftHand we are going to test this next week :).

The lefthandbox was a tiny bit slower to start backup but handled it just as well as the Equallogic box.

quote:

Also, I think Equalogic will provide you better support then Lefthand, or at least I've had better support and responsiveness with Dell then HP (both premium support agreements, whatever the new Gold contract is called for Dell, and the HP equivalent).

Lefthand is owned by HP, but they are run as a seperate company. We would be caling lefthand for support not HP. Same goes for Equalogic. Also, Dell support can be pretty lovely even with gold depending on the time of day you call.

If you are looking at the NSM 2120 ask about the G2. They just started shipping them and has double the performance almost.

Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Dec 21, 2008

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Chucklehead posted:

Any huge red flags about a NetApp filer? HP guys in town are trying to tell me NetApp is the devil.

Repeating everything Oblomov stated, but also wanted to say that you may want to avoid the 2020. Its growth options are a little limited so a better entry point might be the 2050.

How much capacity do you need? What applications and data are going to be using the storage? Do you have other needs (like remote replication for example)?

I can't sell you a box but I figure we can arm you with the right questions to ask your resellers.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

oblomov posted:

IMO, HP is the devil :P.

I refuse to believe a company that sells ink at $40 bucks a pop is the devil :c00lbert:

Seriously though, don't get caught up on that HP owns lefthand. They are just owned by them, but like Dell they are leaving them alone.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Well seeing as how my last question never was really answered, I'll just come out and ask:

Can anyone get me the Data ONTAP 5.3.6R1 system diskette? I need to reset the password on this thing to find the license files, and until I do I'm stuck :(

unknown
Nov 16, 2002
Ain't got no stinking title yet!


Wicaeed posted:

Can anyone get me the Data ONTAP 5.3.6R1 system diskette? I need to reset the password on this thing to find the license files, and until I do I'm stuck :(

Considering that you don't have platinum, haven't posted an email address, and not everyone uses AIM - it's kinda hard to contact you out-of-band with contacts that do Netapp stuff that aren't on the SA forums.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Well the Platinum link is broked, so my email is wicaeed@gmail.com

Thanks.

foobat
Nov 26, 2008
question to the emc guys

I inherited a cx3, mirrored with 52tb of storage about a year ago and setup by the guy before me. We've got a setup where each of the luns is basically exported as an nfs share on a rhel5 box. So

emcpowera -> home01
emcpowerb -> home02
emcpower? -> home09

This of course is becomes a pain for adding users, or having to shuffle them around if a lun runs out of space. I'd like to just use the volume manager to make them "homes" or something appropriate but I have no idea whether this is best practice or just retarted.

Ofc, i'd like to setup some sort of failover for our nfs service but that's another story.

Cheers

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Intrepid00 posted:

Equalogic box we found had 4x the maintance costs then lefthand. We also found Equalogic to cost a lot more, but you may be larger and Dell isn't dicking you on the price.

Well, for us Equalogic pricing is very good (quite large company). Equalogic is actually cheaper then Lefthand for the solution I was looking at. Service cost was very reasonable (we always buy 24x7 premium support), comparible with LeftHand (after discounts) or NetApp (after heavy discounts).

quote:

It would appear so as well to me that this is true. The one thing I did notice is that the Equalogic box will not do replication on the fly with two clusters always being eactly the same. The equalogic box will only do scheadule.

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean you can't just kick off replication but need to schedule it? Haven't tried, thanks for the tip, will test it in the lab.

quote:

The Lefthand boxes tend to have less drives and will not max out the 2GB limit of the equalogic box. I don't even thing the PS5000 will get above 2GB as well unless you are throwing SAS 15K RPM's at it.

Yeap, I doubt either will max out 2GB even with SAS 15K RPMs (that's what we specced).

quote:

Lefthand is owned by HP, but they are run as a seperate company. We would be caling lefthand for support not HP. Same goes for Equalogic. Also, Dell support can be pretty lovely even with gold depending on the time of day you call.

If you are looking at the NSM 2120 ask about the G2. They just started shipping them and has double the performance almost.

Well, this is the setup for now, but you bet that HP is working on integration. Our usual Dell calls are very good since we have account managers we can call and bitch at if things don't go the right way, and then poo poo gets escalated.

If you don't mind answering, how big is your LeftHand setup? I am kind of leaning LeftHand over Equalogic at this moment (but NetApp may win out). Trying to get some references from a large customer out of Lefthand (basically our management wants to see a large rollout, understandably) and I am not sure if Lefthand has many decent sized customers (beyond one large gov customer doing archived storage on it).

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Intrepid00 posted:

I refuse to believe a company that sells ink at $40 bucks a pop is the devil :c00lbert:

Seriously though, don't get caught up on that HP owns lefthand. They are just owned by them, but like Dell they are leaving them alone.

In both of these cases, the situation will not last long, IMO. It's just not efficient way of doing things, especially for HP (not like LeftHand is high end storage for HP).

paperchaseguy
Feb 21, 2002

THEY'RE GONNA SAY NO

foobat posted:

question to the emc guys

I inherited a cx3, mirrored with 52tb of storage about a year ago and setup by the guy before me. We've got a setup where each of the luns is basically exported as an nfs share on a rhel5 box. So

emcpowera -> home01
emcpowerb -> home02
emcpower? -> home09

This of course is becomes a pain for adding users, or having to shuffle them around if a lun runs out of space. I'd like to just use the volume manager to make them "homes" or something appropriate but I have no idea whether this is best practice or just retarted.

Ofc, i'd like to setup some sort of failover for our nfs service but that's another story.

Cheers

You want one home directory instead of three? Sure, that's possible with a logical volume manager. Or you could merge the three LUNs into one large metavolume. The problem is then you have a 52TB filesystem. What happens when you reboot and have to do a fsck? Or a crash of the host where you certainly will have to clean it? I haven't seen a lot of large Linux / ext3 filesystems so I can't say for sure, but I would think that the fscks would take a large amount of time. What happens now when you reboot, how large is your biggest filesystem? The largest filesystem in my memory was a 10TB NTFS that was a bear after a crash. They eventually cut it down to ten 1TB filesystems.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

oblomov posted:

Well, for us Equalogic pricing is very good (quite large company). Equalogic is actually cheaper then Lefthand for the solution I was looking at.

On the other hand we are just a around an 50 user software company. We fit in more with the Small Business.

quote:

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean you can't just kick off replication but need to schedule it? Haven't tried, thanks for the tip, will test it in the lab.

I believe you have to scheadule it (5 min being min.) and if you so choose you can't have the replication actually be a mirror if you so choose. While the lefthand box has varying levels of Network raid and repelication.

quote:

Yeap, I doubt either will max out 2GB even with SAS 15K RPMs (that's what we specced).

Only that monster 45 drive one might that Equalogic has, but that's more of storage need performance you are looking for.

quote:

Well, this is the setup for now, but you bet that HP is working on integration. Our usual Dell calls are very good since we have account managers we can call and bitch at if things don't go the right way, and then poo poo gets escalated.

If you don't mind answering, how big is your LeftHand setup? I am kind of leaning LeftHand over Equalogic at this moment (but NetApp may win out). Trying to get some references from a large customer out of Lefthand (basically our management wants to see a large rollout, understandably) and I am not sure if Lefthand has many decent sized customers (beyond one large gov customer doing archived storage on it).

Unfortunally I can only tell you will most diffently have a much large SAN network. You may also want to look, I think the Equalogic as a controller cap while the Lefthand boxes have almost none.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Intrepid00 posted:

On the other hand we are just a around an 50 user software company. We fit in more with the Small Business.

Ahh, yeah, that's much harder to drive Dell down in price. We literally spent couple million this year with them (actually, maybe even a bit more then a couple). So we have huge negotiating position with Dell. Just need to mention magical words "Hewlett Packard" and price goes down :).

quote:

I believe you have to scheadule it (5 min being min.) and if you so choose you can't have the replication actually be a mirror if you so choose. While the lefthand box has varying levels of Network raid and repelication.

Makes sense, and yeah, I found Lefthand to be much more flexible software wise. I am just basically not sure if I can trust it on a large scale. That's my fear. Hence search for references, hopefully Lefthand can come through on that since it will give us another good choice.

quote:

Only that monster 45 drive one might that Equalogic has, but that's more of storage need performance you are looking for.

Yeap, that's an interesting box Equalogic has there. Kind of like Sun 48 drive server. I would think that 3GB is quite enough there since it's really bulk storage, they don't have enough controller performance to really drive this until next year's upgrades (whenever those come).

quote:

Unfortunally I can only tell you will most diffently have a much large SAN network. You may also want to look, I think the Equalogic as a controller cap while the Lefthand boxes have almost none.

I appreciate the discussion, hard to find a lot of info on the web comparing Equalogic, and Lefthand. Stability with either is what I am worried about at larger scales. Scalability wise both will be similar because with Lefthand, you are looking at double the boxes (at Network Raid 2) and according to Lefthand around 20-25 you are basically tapping out the expandability, which by the time you are done is comparable to group of 12 for Equalogic (which is supposed to get expanded next year). Now, you can argue that cluster side for Equalogic is only limited to 8 boxes inside each group, but you can still copy stuff between clusters. Dunno, each has pluses and minuses. I have the feeling we'll go NetApp for the moment though and then will do a much longer eval next year. That will also let us check out say 3Par.

foobat
Nov 26, 2008

paperchaseguy posted:

You want one home directory instead of three? Sure, that's possible with a logical volume manager. Or you could merge the three LUNs into one large metavolume. The problem is then you have a 52TB filesystem. What happens when you reboot and have to do a fsck? Or a crash of the host where you certainly will have to clean it? I haven't seen a lot of large Linux / ext3 filesystems so I can't say for sure, but I would think that the fscks would take a large amount of time. What happens now when you reboot, how large is your biggest filesystem? The largest filesystem in my memory was a 10TB NTFS that was a bear after a crash. They eventually cut it down to ten 1TB filesystems.

sorry didn't make it clear, i have about 20 luns, each is about a terrabyte, and i'm just wondering what other guys do.

I'm getting to a point where a group of users have generated more than a couple terrabytes of actual data and i'd rather not have to tell them, "well you now how 3 or 4 groups spaces for your data" as that is a good way to get data replication and for them to constantly bitch and moan.

Chucklehead
Apr 14, 2004
I couldn't think of a custom title, so I got this piece of shit instead!

1000101 posted:

Repeating everything Oblomov stated, but also wanted to say that you may want to avoid the 2020. Its growth options are a little limited so a better entry point might be the 2050.

How much capacity do you need? What applications and data are going to be using the storage? Do you have other needs (like remote replication for example)?

I can't sell you a box but I figure we can arm you with the right questions to ask your resellers.

Thanks, I am going to take you up on the offer.

Our data center is currently 1.2TB spread amongst netware file/email servers and windows application boxes. We have 1200 people in our company spread over HQ and 35 branches. Branches range from 8-100 people.

I am working on a virtualization project, we are going to p2v our windows boxes in the next few months. We have some network boxes: email filtering, IDS logging, network monitoring, etc. The remaining windows boxes are running various FI applications: accounting software, budget software, etc etc - most of these things are windows/sql/application. Eventually we want to split off the DB's and host them in their own SQL farm/cluster - we will see how much the DBA likes vmware.

People get really antsy in their pants when we talk about DBs and all the performance required etc etc - majority of our DBs have 10-20 people accessing them with the exception of groupwise which has everyone connecting to it.

As a financial institution we are required to have DR and BCP plans so we need to replicate portions of our SAN to our DR site - bandwidth isn't really a concern, if we need it we'll buy it. One of the compelling features of getting a netapp filer is the snapshot replication - no one from HP has bothered to explain their replication yet.

A few things we are definitely pursuing: A Citrix XenApp farm, we currently have some people sharing certain desktops with magical applications installed on them, I also thing Citrix will help out our remote users - more and more people want to work on the road, from home etc.

VDI/Thin apps: Our CIO does not feel that deploying a full desktop to certain people makes.

One huge thing that attracts me to NetApp is just the flexibility and their whole philosophy. We are going through a massive change in infrastructure here, they are bringing in tonnes of applications and I need to make them available in a DR scenario and even to remote employees. HP would have me buy all FC drives and connect the whole works on FC - doesn't make sense to me.

I appreciate your help - for what its worth the guy I am working with at NetApp has been really great so far.

Edit: As usual I wasn't quite specific enough to start put with. Here is what I have envisioned so far:
6 ESX hosts connected via 8x1G Ethernet. 2 Host Novell Netware Groupwise Cluster, connected via 1G Ethernet, potentially FC. A 2 - 4 Host MS SQL cluster connected via 1G Ethernet, potentially FC. A 2 Host Oracle cluster connected via NFS (1G Ethernet). Our DR site will be pretty similar, just fewer boxes. I say potentially FC because the performance may require it - but can't we just use ethernet teaming to deliver more iSCSI/NFS bandwidth?

We are re-doing our DC network as well so anything I need to implement from the network side to do this right can also be designed now.

Chucklehead fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 23, 2008

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated
Well, I would be real careful connecting all that stuff to a 2050. IMO, this is either multiple NetApp clusters or 3140 (and maybe higher) type of setup. Here is the thing to think about - you do NOT need FC connectivity to the filers from your server. I am running SQL Server, Oracle, Exchange, File Services, VMware (couple dozen hosts at one site here), and whole bunch of other crap. Number of users ranges from couple thousand (for file services) to about 14K for Exchange to 30K Sharepoint instance running off SQL to multiple heavy production DBs.

Guess what, it's all iSCSI or in case of Oracle and one of the VMware clusters, NFS. Fiber is overrated for vast majority of environments. For the org your size and what you are looking to do, fiber is just overkill.

If you go with a single SAN scenario (and even with multiples), you just have to make sure to layout network ports (or fiber if you so desire) appropriately, get enough shelves in different aggregates (i.e. you don't want to put Groupwise on same disks as say your financial DBs) and generally, use common sense.

Replication, btw, works, but it's not panacea. SnapMirror has a fairly sizable impact on CPU (do it at night). You have to make sure to get appropriate software to quiesce your apps. I have no clue, for example, if NetApp offers GroupWise support.

For VMware servers, do you mean each one will have 8x1GB connections for iSCSI or is this 8x1GB total amongst eight? You can use NFS, btw, with Netapp and VMware. There are some pro/con scenarios for either iSCSI or NFS.

Chucklehead posted:

Edit: As usual I wasn't quite specific enough to start put with. Here is what I have envisioned so far:
6 ESX hosts connected via 8x1G Ethernet. 2 Host Novell Netware Groupwise Cluster, connected via 1G Ethernet, potentially FC. A 2 - 4 Host MS SQL cluster connected via 1G Ethernet, potentially FC. A 2 Host Oracle cluster connected via NFS (1G Ethernet). Our DR site will be pretty similar, just fewer boxes. I say potentially FC because the performance may require it - but can't we just use ethernet teaming to deliver more iSCSI/NFS bandwidth?

We are re-doing our DC network as well so anything I need to implement from the network side to do this right can also be designed now.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Can anyone with a Netapp Now subscription tell me if the ONTAP 6.5.1R1 is installable on a FAS720? I'm reading the documentation that came with my ONTAP release CD, and it says there should be a folder called Alpha for the F700 series filers under CD-Drive:\ONTAP\6_5_1R1, however my CD only has folders X86 and MIPS. Do I have a "special" cd or am I missing a folder?

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Wicaeed posted:

Can anyone with a Netapp Now subscription tell me if the ONTAP 6.5.1R1 is installable on a FAS720? I'm reading the documentation that came with my ONTAP release CD, and it says there should be a folder called Alpha for the F700 series filers under CD-Drive:\ONTAP\6_5_1R1, however my CD only has folders X86 and MIPS. Do I have a "special" cd or am I missing a folder?

Sounds like you are missing some stuff. The last release I see for a 720 is 6.5.7.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
I don't have a Now subscription, but I have a disk with the 6.5.1R1 ONTAP release on it, but it seems to be missing some files...

Chucklehead
Apr 14, 2004
I couldn't think of a custom title, so I got this piece of shit instead!

oblomov posted:

FC Stuff

If you go with a single SAN scenario (and even with multiples), you just have to make sure to layout network ports (or fiber if you so desire) appropriately, get enough shelves in different aggregates (i.e. you don't want to put Groupwise on same disks as say your financial DBs) and generally, use common sense.

Replication, btw, works, but it's not panacea. SnapMirror has a fairly sizable impact on CPU (do it at night). You have to make sure to get appropriate software to quiesce your apps. I have no clue, for example, if NetApp offers GroupWise support.

For VMware servers, do you mean each one will have 8x1GB connections for iSCSI or is this 8x1GB total amongst eight? You can use NFS, btw, with Netapp and VMware. There are some pro/con scenarios for either iSCSI or NFS.

I was pretty sure about the FC - it costs more which is why they want us to buy it of course. I keep using a video card analogy at work - ya the $600 card is the best but its a waste of money when the $200 will get us by.

What would be some deciding factors when going with multiple SANs/Controllers? You are the first person to bring this up but I have always thought it might be a better idea to go with one FAS for vmware and maybe one for DBs/Groupwise.

Replication has been another issue for me. All of the sales guys will of course tell me we can do active/active across the WAN but I was pretty sure that was BS. Can we have a couple of DBs and maybe a few VMs as active/active and the rest get replicated over night? I forget the acronyms right now but what is a realistic recovery objective with SnapMirror? If we are replicating over night we could potentially lose a day of data?

Our VMware boxes are HP DL380 G5s, they ship with 2x onboard GigE ports, I am planning to purchase two additional quad gig NIC cards - this is likely overkill but the vmware consulting guys said it was 'best practice'. Our farm will consist of 6 hosts to start with: 20Ghz/32Gb ram each.

brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.
Any thoughts on the Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV? I'm helping a friend who is an all Dell shop and it's difficult to look at the quotes because they don't break down the pricing at all. The quote is for:

Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV, High Performance,15K SAS Drives (223-6501)
2.3TB capacity, 16 X 146GB 15K SAS, Dual Controller (341-6484)
EqualLogic Complete Care Plus,Same Day 4 Hour Parts,PS5000XV,Full, Initial Year (987-6390)

for $41k, seems steep considering I could purchase a comparable HP MSA 2012i for much less. Dell also told him they don't do evals, which doesn't seem right. I think he needs to evaluate one against his workload to make sure it's adequately sized. I'd throw out that $31-34k is more reasonable, but then again, don't know a lot about Dell.

ghostinmyshell
Sep 17, 2004



I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.
I'm not happy with Lefthands support. As soon as LH can identify the problem is not in relation to their software, you enter the bermuda triangle dealing with HP for the hardware side of things.

We had their 4 hr premium support, so LH calls up HP to dick around with them to get a tech sent out. I mean seriously, I was on the line listening to the HP rep give the same poo poo to our LH case manager that you or any other person calling for tech support would get.

Eventually, HP send us a technician the next day with the wrong parts and who knows absolutely nothing about the problem we are having with the software or the hardware. gently caress I don't care by this point who fixes the problem.

LH then plays the blame game with HP and it's going back and forth. I really wanted to tell our LH case manager, "No, listen you fucks we pay you for the support, therefore the burden is on you guys to fix our problems, quit loving around here like a smug rear end in a top hat."

After some calls to higher ups, we finally got the right hardware, a decent tech and the problem resolved... only two days later.

rage-saq
Mar 21, 2001

Thats so ninja...

ghostinmyshell posted:

I'm not happy with Lefthands support. As soon as LH can identify the problem is not in relation to their software, you enter the bermuda triangle dealing with HP for the hardware side of things.

We had their 4 hr premium support, so LH calls up HP to dick around with them to get a tech sent out. I mean seriously, I was on the line listening to the HP rep give the same poo poo to our LH case manager that you or any other person calling for tech support would get.

Eventually, HP send us a technician the next day with the wrong parts and who knows absolutely nothing about the problem we are having with the software or the hardware. gently caress I don't care by this point who fixes the problem.

LH then plays the blame game with HP and it's going back and forth. I really wanted to tell our LH case manager, "No, listen you fucks we pay you for the support, therefore the burden is on you guys to fix our problems, quit loving around here like a smug rear end in a top hat."

After some calls to higher ups, we finally got the right hardware, a decent tech and the problem resolved... only two days later.

Sounds like someone is wishing they got a 6 Hour Call To Repair warranty instead :)
Its mighty expensive though, nearly double 4 hour response!

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

ghostinmyshell posted:

After some calls to higher ups, we finally got the right hardware, a decent tech and the problem resolved... only two days later.

Dell does this poo poo too though.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

brent78 posted:

Any thoughts on the Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV?

Earlier some guy in this thread had a lab full of them.

I also didn't like the fact that the controller was active/passive. For the Price Dell wanted I could get two Lefthand boxes, Set the reduancy to 2 and get active/active and fault tolerance that if one box broke we would keep on going with zero downtime.

They proably quoted you fancy numbers how they beat lefthand on perforamce with exchange. I looked that up too on MS's website. They didn't have redudancy, Lefthand had two clusters mirrored. If you took out that mirror the iops would go up.

Also, do you need the SAS drives? Have you done metrics to see if you are overbuying? Remember, this is virtual storage. You don't need to buy what you will need in performance/storage 5 years down the road. Espically when 5 years down the road it will either be cheaper or even faster.

Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Dec 31, 2008

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

rage-saq posted:

Sounds like someone is wishing they got a 6 Hour Call To Repair warranty instead :)
Its mighty expensive though, nearly double 4 hour response!

Rage, can you clarify on this? Is this through HP or Lefthand support? Personally, I think I am going to go with NetApp after all. Equalogic's lack of dual-target replication may just be a deal breaker, and I do not want to deal with these sorts of supports issues that were talked about with Lefthand/HP combo.

Brent78, PS5000XV seems to be pretty good as long as you understand what you are and are not getting. I don't see a big deal in having 2 Lefthand boxes doing exactly the same thing as 2 Equalogic boxes. Lefthand wins a bit of redundancy (how often do SANs burst into flames after all) and software flexibility and Lefthand wins a bit on performance, rack space, power consumption and mainly on support. If I was sure of Lefthand support I would go with them, but I am not and I haven't gotten references from them on large customer install base.

Chucklehead, as far as different filers go, keep in mind the SAN you are getting, number of ports, number of shelves, etc... Also, there is a good chance that you will be taken the whole thing down for maintenance. Realistically, as long as you have enough ports/bandwidth and SAN Controller I/O throughput, disk I/O will be what matters for multiple types of work profiles.

Say you have Groupwise, SQL Server and a VMware cluster to put on a SAN. You could say get a single 3170 SAN and get enough shelves to form multiple aggregates to serve all of this, or you could get two different 3140 SANs instead, one for Groupwise and SQL and another for VMware. You won't have to have as many aggregates per each NetApp active-active cluster and you will have more flexibility during upgrades/maintenance and actually more connectivity options. Price-wise, I am not sure how this would come out, dual 3140s will probably be more expensive though.

Also, IMO, 10 ports per ESX host is kind of overkill. That's a lot of cost right there. What do you really need? You need 1 for control crap, vcenter, etc..., 1 for VMotion, say 2-3 for iSCSI and couple for front-end. Shouldn't need more then 6-8 per host, IMO. This is 20Ghz you said, so dual quad 2.5? I doubt you will saturate more then 2GB from say iSCSI or NFS. You can go FC, but that's just overkill on cost, IMO, for your situation.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

oblomov posted:

Rage, can you clarify on this? Is this through HP or Lefthand support? Personally, I think I am going to go with NetApp after all. Equalogic's lack of dual-target replication may just be a deal breaker, and I do not want to deal with these sorts of supports issues that were talked about with Lefthand/HP combo.

I'd like to know how long ago he had the problem. Lefthand is now HP and I seriously doubt you would get any run around now.

rage-saq
Mar 21, 2001

Thats so ninja...

oblomov posted:

Rage, can you clarify on this? Is this through HP or Lefthand support? Personally, I think I am going to go with NetApp after all.

Well in a few weeks their support will be through HP.
6 hour Call To Repair is expensive because it is the highest level of support you can get. You call in an issue and HP basically promises it is resolved in 6 hours. That means they stock spare parts for you at the local warehouse, and make sure they have enough certified techs in your area to cover you should a problem arise. This is basically pulling out all the stops so your poo poo gets fixed ASAP.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

rage-saq posted:

Well in a few weeks their support will be through HP.
6 hour Call To Repair is expensive because it is the highest level of support you can get. You call in an issue and HP basically promises it is resolved in 6 hours. That means they stock spare parts for you at the local warehouse, and make sure they have enough certified techs in your area to cover you should a problem arise. This is basically pulling out all the stops so your poo poo gets fixed ASAP.

Hmm... I will hit up my rep on this. The other route is frankly unacceptable. One of big reasons even at looking at something other then NetApp is less downtime and quicker potential fixes. If it takes 2 days to repair a SAN, that's simply unacceptable. The fact that their support is going to be through HP is what concerns me most actually. IMO, HP support is simply not up to par considering their pricing.

rage-saq
Mar 21, 2001

Thats so ninja...

oblomov posted:

Hmm... I will hit up my rep on this. The other route is frankly unacceptable. One of big reasons even at looking at something other then NetApp is less downtime and quicker potential fixes. If it takes 2 days to repair a SAN, that's simply unacceptable. The fact that their support is going to be through HP is what concerns me most actually. IMO, HP support is simply not up to par considering their pricing.

HP support options like 4 hour 24/7 etc is just as good as anyone elses these days on Standard equipment, if you really need to have insane support you buy 6 hour CTR. LeftHand should be getting shelved under Standard equipment so the same Proliant level warranty options will apply.

If you REALLY want crazy support, you need to step it up to Enterprise equipment, stuff like EVA's, ESL's and XP's have insane warranty options. This is the kind of equipment that competes directly with Netapp, as Netapp predominantly makes Enterprise level equipment.
EVA's are awesome (installing one right now as a matter of fact) and have all sorts of warranty/support/prefailure replacement + auto dialhome that just don't appear on the Lefthand/MSA level Standard storage lines.

If you get an XP you can get a support contract with HP for 7 9's uptime. Thats like 6 seconds of downtime per year. This is what runs the NASDAQ and thats the kind of warranty they have.

rage-saq fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Jan 5, 2009

Chucklehead
Apr 14, 2004
I couldn't think of a custom title, so I got this piece of shit instead!

oblomov posted:

Awesome information

Just wanted to say thanks - you have given me a lot more useful information than most of the guys we are paying to be consultants.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

rage-saq posted:

HP support options like 4 hour 24/7 etc is just as good as anyone elses these days on Standard equipment, if you really need to have insane support you buy 6 hour CTR. LeftHand should be getting shelved under Standard equipment so the same Proliant level warranty options will apply.

If you REALLY want crazy support, you need to step it up to Enterprise equipment, stuff like EVA's, ESL's and XP's have insane warranty options. This is the kind of equipment that competes directly with Netapp, as Netapp predominantly makes Enterprise level equipment.
EVA's are awesome (installing one right now as a matter of fact) and have all sorts of warranty/support/prefailure replacement + auto dialhome that just don't appear on the Lefthand/MSA level Standard storage lines.

If you get an XP you can get a support contract with HP for 7 9's uptime. Thats like 6 seconds of downtime per year. This is what runs the NASDAQ and thats the kind of warranty they have.

Yeap, we run various NetApps from older FAS270 to newer 6080 beasts. I know all about the Enterprise support :). At the end, whatever they say, it all comes down to techs. The 7 9's uptime is certainly doable with enough SAN hardware and replication but it's very very costly. The reason for me looking at LeftHand or Equalogic is flexibility. Traditional SANs are very inflexible and whatever they say about downtime, mid-range Enterprise solution (even say NetApp 6080) has some basic vulnerabilities that are inescapable. Not sure about higher-end HPs, not familiar with them, but I've seen DMX boxes drop whatever EMC says.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.

oblomov posted:

If it takes 2 days to repair a SAN, that's simply unacceptable.

I seriously doubt now you are risk of a 2 day repair downtime and if you had to stay up and something extreamly bad happened to one of my nodes I'd remove the node from the cluster so the cluster would restrip and become redudant again if it went past 4 hours.

Anyway, we went with lefthand and the boxes arrive thurdayish. Hopefully we didn't make the wrong decision, but I don't think we did.

Chucklehead
Apr 14, 2004
I couldn't think of a custom title, so I got this piece of shit instead!

Intrepid00 posted:

I seriously doubt now you are risk of a 2 day repair downtime and if you had to stay up and something extreamly bad happened to one of my nodes I'd remove the node from the cluster so the cluster would restrip and become redudant again if it went past 4 hours.

Anyway, we went with lefthand and the boxes arrive thurdayish. Hopefully we didn't make the wrong decision, but I don't think we did.

Let us know how it goes.

I should be getting a FAS2020 demo unit here right away but HP has also just proposed a Lefthand solution to us instead of the EVA.

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AmericanCitizen
Nov 25, 2003

I am the ass-kickin clown that'll twist you like a balloon animal. I will beat your head against this bumper until the airbags deploy.

Intrepid00 posted:

I seriously doubt now you are risk of a 2 day repair downtime and if you had to stay up and something extreamly bad happened to one of my nodes I'd remove the node from the cluster so the cluster would restrip and become redudant again if it went past 4 hours.

Anyway, we went with lefthand and the boxes arrive thurdayish. Hopefully we didn't make the wrong decision, but I don't think we did.

Chucklehead posted:

Let us know how it goes.

I should be getting a FAS2020 demo unit here right away but HP has also just proposed a Lefthand solution to us instead of the EVA.

Can both of you guys post your experiences, please?

My company is in basically the same boat- narrowed down to either LeftHand or a lower-end NetApp. I'm very interested in any kind of feedback you have.

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