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brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.
Just picked up an EqualLogic PS5000XV fully populated with 300 GB 15k SAS. Will report back when I have it hooked up.

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

AmericanCitizen posted:

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.

My experience is that the sales guys are going to lie right to your face and hope you are ignorant and/or lazy and don't call them on their bullshit.

Read this thread - the information in the OP is terrific.

Know what you need, you have to have a pretty good idea of what kind of data is in your environment.

I'll do a full post after I get the thing working.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Chucklehead posted:

My experience is that the sales guys are going to lie right to your face and hope you are ignorant and/or lazy and don't call them on their bullshit.

Read this thread - the information in the OP is terrific.

Know what you need, you have to have a pretty good idea of what kind of data is in your environment.

I'll do a full post after I get the thing working.

Also, what are you looking to do with the SAN and how proficient are you in various SAN technology in general and how much time will you have to manage the said SAN? For example, NetApp can do NFS, CIFS, and Fiber in addition to iSCSI, so if any of that looks attractive, LeftHand simply can't do it. Pricewise, the difference is not going to be large either way. LeftHand has better interface and more flexible design, while NetApp has proven architecture/support/stability. You can lift and replace NetApp controllers to move your data to bigger boxes, with LeftHand you can just add more units (up to say 20 or so).

I got both Equalogic and LeftHand in the lab, and both are pretty good. My company has lots and lots of NetApp storage so I deal with it on daily basis (provisioning, monitoring, configuring, etc...). Hell, that Sun hybrid storage looks pretty nice too. Friend of mine got Compellent and that's also pretty solid (small company though, so who knows what will happen down the road.

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

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

oblomov posted:

For example, NetApp can do NFS, CIFS, and Fiber in addition to iSCSI, so if any of that looks attractive, LeftHand simply can't do it.

I'm not to thrilled with running NFS or any file service right off my storage. I'd like to minamize its attack surface.

Also, unless you have long sequantial reads/writes (movies) you don't need fiber either. And with 10 g/bit cards on the market if you have no fiber already, starting now is proably a waste.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

Intrepid00 posted:

I'm not to thrilled with running NFS or any file service right off my storage. I'd like to minamize its attack surface.

Also, unless you have long sequantial reads/writes (movies) you don't need fiber either. And with 10 g/bit cards on the market if you have no fiber already, starting now is proably a waste.

There is no attack surface if the VLANs are non-routable with NFS. It's much the same as iSCSI, really. Some apps behave better (Oracle, VMware with NetApp). For fiber, I think the transmission protocol is better but then you can (or will be able to) do fiber over ethernet I guess. Also, there are some other heavy data scientific/engineering apps where the more heavier iSCSI protocols won't function as well, IMO. That said, yeah, if you don't have fiber investment now, it's most likely an unnecessary option.

gallop w/a boner
Aug 16, 2002

Hell Gem
Is it possible to measure IOPS using Windows System Monitor?

da sponge
May 24, 2004

..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

gallop w/a boner posted:

Is it possible to measure IOPS using Windows System Monitor?

IO requests/sec is a ~equivalent metric in perfmon.

IkeTurner
Apr 19, 2002
Does anyone have any experience with BlueArc?

We have a Titan 2500 set up at my office, and the performance is incredible. I was curious if anyone else here is using anything similar to this, what their experience has been, and what they're using it for.

I'm in the litigation support business and my company handles e-Discovery projects using our own in-house software. Due to the nature of how e-Discovery production works, we needed a storage solution that could handle very fast throughput of massive amounts of small files. So far, the BlueArc solution has worked really well. I'm a software developer, so I don't know many of the real-world performance metrics we're getting, but if anyone is interested I can find out.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

tinabeatr posted:

Does anyone have any experience with BlueArc?

There is no pole long enough.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

tinabeatr posted:

Does anyone have any experience with BlueArc?

We have a Titan 2500 set up at my office, and the performance is incredible. I was curious if anyone else here is using anything similar to this, what their experience has been, and what they're using it for.

I'm in the litigation support business and my company handles e-Discovery projects using our own in-house software. Due to the nature of how e-Discovery production works, we needed a storage solution that could handle very fast throughput of massive amounts of small files. So far, the BlueArc solution has worked really well. I'm a software developer, so I don't know many of the real-world performance metrics we're getting, but if anyone is interested I can find out.
Their support really tries to go the extra mile when they can, but they seem extremely disorganized. We've frequently had them say they're showing up on a certain day to support something and then not answer emails about what time to expect them, after which they either might or might not show up. Whatever, these have always been for non-critical issues and support staff get diverted to more critical problems from other people, it's not a big deal. Sometimes they show up and can't complete the work they were supposed to. (They installed their call-home application awhile ago, which they insisted required a distribution we don't support; who the gently caress writes software for Linux and doesn't support Red Hat? Thank God that Puppet makes one-offs like this easy enough to maintain.) We had a try-and-buy that we've had boxed up for a few months (we have a different unit in production) and it took them a couple of months to get it out of our storage room. The stuff they redistribute from third-parties like Xyratex is sometimes off-quality, and sometimes utter garbage; I can't find enough bad things to say about the disk controllers in the SA-48s. The switch they installed for the NAS's private management network is some piece-of-poo poo $250 Netgear managed switch. If we're going to be paying six figures for storage gear, I at least expect some real vendors on the backend. Still, it hasn't broken on us yet, and I guess that's what's important.

The way that some of their application-level stuff makes me a bit wary. Their call-home application works by parsing logs sent via email, rather than dealing with SNMP traps or anything proper. This is conspicuous, and leads me to believe that there might not be great cooperation between some of their engineering groups. Still, it works without a problem, so I guess I shouldn't really care how they do things until stuff starts not working right.

Short of that, though, they're a pretty decent company. The hardware is good and does what it's supposed to. I don't think we've had a single problem with the fibre or SATA hardware outside of the high-density SA-48 enclosures which seem to experience perpetual controller failures. They've never screwed us, they're hard-working, and we haven't had any stability or performance issues with it in spite of hitting it seriously hard with 504 nodes at once over NFS. I have had major issues on critical systems with companies like IBM and Dell that BlueArc hasn't given me yet. For low-cost high-performance storage for an HPC environment or similar scratch space, I'd recommend them. I don't know that I trust them enough for anything truly "enterprise" grade, though.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jan 20, 2009

Jadus
Sep 11, 2003

In general, what are people doing to back up these large multi-TB systems?

Our company is currently looking at scanning most of the paper trail from the last 20 years and putting it on disk. We've already got a direct-attached MD3000 from Dell so we're not worried about storage space. However, backing up that data doesn't seem to be as easy.

If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window? If it's back up to disk, what are you doing for offsite backups, and how can you push so much data within the same window?

I think I may be missing something obvious here, and if so proceed to call me all sorts of names, but I don't see an ideal solution.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Jadus posted:

In general, what are people doing to back up these large multi-TB systems?

Our company is currently looking at scanning most of the paper trail from the last 20 years and putting it on disk. We've already got a direct-attached MD3000 from Dell so we're not worried about storage space. However, backing up that data doesn't seem to be as easy.

If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window? If it's back up to disk, what are you doing for offsite backups, and how can you push so much data within the same window?

I think I may be missing something obvious here, and if so proceed to call me all sorts of names, but I don't see an ideal solution.
Yes. All enterprise backup software on the market has the ability to stream data from a single server to multiple drives at once, though generally for smaller servers you're going to be going disk-to-disk and then the backup server is going to stream it off to tape at once. This is because if you don't stream data fast enough, the tape starts and stops, starts and stops, starts and stops, and in addition to killing your speeds and latency, it's not good for the drive or the media. We're running IBM 3584 (now TS3500) cabinets with 10 drives apiece, running on a SAN and managed by a single server running Tivoli Storage Manager. We're going to scale it out to 2 servers very soon.

There's a lot of different options available to you and they all depend on what you need and what you're willing to pay. If you don't need file-level granularity, lots of SAN vendors have flash copy capability, and the ability to plug into enterprise backup products like Tivoli Storage Manager, CommVault or NetBackup, which will perform differential block-level backups of the SAN volumes.

The advantage of block-level backups is that you don't waste any time analyzing files to see what changed, because the SAN keeps an inventory of dirty blocks on the volume. This is generally a good idea for volumes with a ton of small files, whereas larger files back up easier with a file-based backup product, and it improves both your RTO/RPO really substantially for full-on disaster recovery scenarios. The disadvantage is that you lose all of your granularity to restore specific data from the backup set. So, really, when you plan this out, you need to look at your most likely failure scenarios, what they'll cost you, and what you need to restore first. If your system management tools are good enough, ability to do a bare-metal restore really doesn't matter, because you can restore configurations just as fast from your tools while your backup product works on important data. This is the case with my Linux systems managed by Puppet.

Keep in mind that even if you have a huge volume of files on a mission-critical storage server, people don't need 100% of the files restored immediately. When it comes to file storage, users need what they're working on, which you can restore first, and then restore everything else later. Contrary to popular belief, RTO does not always apply to full volumes. If you can get the users satisfied with what's restored first within a quick enough timeframe, they're not going to care much about the rest of the restore time (within reason).

brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.

Jadus posted:

If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window?
We use the HP MSL tape libraries with LTO4 and it will saturate the gigabit network at a sustained 940 Mbps. I'd say that's pretty fast. It's usually the backup source disk i/o that's the bottleneck, not the tape.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Jadus posted:



If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window? If it's back up to disk, what are you doing for offsite backups, and how can you push so much data within the same window?


Usually people use backup to disk locally to enable fast backup and restore. They ultimately still send it to tape.

However this isn't always the case. Vendors these days have disk libraries specifically for backup - they look and act like a tape library. These also have replication so you can replicate to a dsik library at a different site. It used to only be the banks who did this because (as you mentioned above) they have so much data to push they needed tens of libraries and, more expensively, tens of 2GB links.

So now we have deduplication of backup. You backup to disk, it deduplictes the data and then replicates. 30TB becomes 3TB and will happily go over the link.

r u ready to WALK
Sep 29, 2001

gently caress SAN. gently caress it in the ear.

I've been on call this week at work, and on thursday our SAN decided to take a huge poo poo and every single host started getting scsi timeouts.

We've had EMC onsite for four days, i've been working illegally long hours and it's still just as broken.

For the record, we run DMX4 storage for business data, Clariion storage for backup purposes and huge Brocade switches. It's all top tier stuff, but still someone managed to gently caress it up.

To be honest i think we'd have less problems and downtime if we ran single servers on local disks :mad:

skullone
Jan 28, 2009
New user to the forums, but I've lurked on and off for years. Oddly, SA comes up on some google searches for the thing I'm about to talk about...

The Sun X4540 server, or the "Thor" for the Sun sales people who like to impress PHBs...

We just got a pair of X4540's, 48x 1TB drives, with RaidZ (8 groups) we are left with about 32TB useable on each.
Sun promised us that ZFS snapshot replication would work so well, so well in fact that they wanted to use us as a whitepaper study to schill more of their products.

Aside from some initial problems with ZFS snapshot replication (it was so ungodly slow at first), and file systems not mounting in the write order at boot up, these units are starting to fill their roll (albeit months behind schedule).

Word to others who purchase any type of NAS/SAN from -ANY- vendor:
Interview your vendor plenty, even if they bring the "big guns" from corporate who tell you how loving awesome they all are, it doesn't matter.
Get evaluation units in your hands for a few months before you give them a dime, it will save you headaches, cash, and maybe even your job.

And whatever NAS/SAN you get, it'll suck. There will always be odd performance problems that you'll have to spend hours troubleshooting before your vendor will listen to what your saying, only to have them say its a known problem, and a patch will be ready in a few weeks.

I'm not bitter or anything :)

Nomex
Jul 17, 2002

Flame retarded.

Jadus posted:

In general, what are people doing to back up these large multi-TB systems?

Our company is currently looking at scanning most of the paper trail from the last 20 years and putting it on disk. We've already got a direct-attached MD3000 from Dell so we're not worried about storage space. However, backing up that data doesn't seem to be as easy.

If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window? If it's back up to disk, what are you doing for offsite backups, and how can you push so much data within the same window?

I think I may be missing something obvious here, and if so proceed to call me all sorts of names, but I don't see an ideal solution.

To add on to what others have said, because you're going to be dealing with large amounts of unused files, you should look at archiving off everything that doesn't get used in say, 3 months, to secondary storage. As it's mostly unchanging, it doesn't need to be backed up as regularly as your production data. You can use a program like EMC DiskXtender to flip data back and forth transparently between primary and secondary storage as well. As for the actual data backup, if you don't want to use tape, a bunch of vendors offer data de-duplicated disk based backup solutions that are faster and more reliable than tape. For example Data Domain makes a hardware product, EMC uses Avamar software.

cultureulterior
Jan 27, 2004
Does anyone have experience with mogilefs? Any opinions, esp negatives that aren't immediately obvious?

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

skullone posted:

And whatever NAS/SAN you get, it'll suck. There will always be odd performance problems that you'll have to spend hours troubleshooting before your vendor will listen to what your saying, only to have them say its a known problem, and a patch will be ready in a few weeks.

I'm not bitter or anything :)

Seems to be the standard Sun way of doing business. We had similar problems with the X4500 units which shipped with a simply faulty SATA driver, which won't be fixed until Update4, no Update5. You should also be ready for a real heck of a time if you ever start doing what the ZFS papers say you should be able to do with the filesystem. Things start to get hairy with the management tools around a few thousand nested filesystems. Update6 resolved a lot of those issues, but it's still there.

From what I hear, and contrary to what their sales guys insisted, BlueArc appears to be doing demo units now, or is it still their "if we think you like it you have to buy it" try-and-buy program?

In theory I will have a couple of Titan 2200? 2400? units for sale w/ NFS, Clustering, and Data Migrator licenses. Anyone interested? Might also sell the disk trays if we don't have another use for them, Engenio (LSI), around 10 trays of FC and 10 trays of sata. Exact numbers available for serious inquiries.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

H110Hawk posted:

From what I hear, and contrary to what their sales guys insisted, BlueArc appears to be doing demo units now, or is it still their "if we think you like it you have to buy it" try-and-buy program?
Regardless of circumstances, the only vendors who get away with this deal with IT people who have no balls (or female equivalent).

rage-saq
Mar 21, 2001

Thats so ninja...

Misogynist posted:

IT people who have no balls (or female equivalent).

They are called Thatchers. :colbert:

skullone posted:

And whatever NAS/SAN you get, it'll suck. There will always be odd performance problems that you'll have to spend hours troubleshooting before your vendor will listen to what your saying, only to have them say its a known problem, and a patch will be ready in a few weeks.

I'm not bitter or anything

The fact that there are consultants/vendors out there that allow this kind of behavior is appalling. You are dropping a lot of cash for a very advanced piece of equipment that is just supposed to work, if it doesn't you should return it and get something that does.
I do enterprise storage design/consulting/implementation primarily around HP products and I can honestly say all of my deployments work 100% as advertised with no mysterious performance/reliability problems. Thats the whole loving point of doing this. If the product couldn't deliver as advertised I would be the first one trying to get the customer a refund as well as not recommending it in the future.

My personal opinion is that this is what you get when you go with generic server equipment and then use some kind of general purpose operating system + software package to accomplish this kind of low level stuff. A lot of Sun's entry products utilizing ZFS seem to fit this kind of bill along with other stuff I'm not a fan of like LeftHand etc. Your mileage may vary of course.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

rage-saq posted:

They are called Thatchers. :colbert:


The fact that there are consultants/vendors out there that allow this kind of behavior is appalling. You are dropping a lot of cash for a very advanced piece of equipment that is just supposed to work, if it doesn't you should return it and get something that does.
I do enterprise storage design/consulting/implementation primarily around HP products and I can honestly say all of my deployments work 100% as advertised with no mysterious performance/reliability problems. Thats the whole loving point of doing this. If the product couldn't deliver as advertised I would be the first one trying to get the customer a refund as well as not recommending it in the future.

My personal opinion is that this is what you get when you go with generic server equipment and then use some kind of general purpose operating system + software package to accomplish this kind of low level stuff. A lot of Sun's entry products utilizing ZFS seem to fit this kind of bill along with other stuff I'm not a fan of like LeftHand etc. Your mileage may vary of course.

Funny enough, just had Sun come in and do a dog and pony show on the new 7000 series storage. Hardware seems interesting, but software seems very very raw. I think we are going to skip on the Sun option. On Lefthand, I dunno, I would say I disagree to the extent that I have been able to test in the lab. I've a little 3 node cluster in the lab and so far it behaves as advertised. We put some VMware, Exchange, and SQL volumes on it, turned things off to test Network Raid-2/3, dropped power on the whole cluster, hit it with iometer, jetstress, etc.. and so far they have been behaving fairly well. Their software is also simply awesome.

I do a lot with NetApp SANs and while they are pretty stable and "Enterprise" grade, we still get little glitches, etc... I've seen EMC drop the ball too. I don't think anyone is immune, including HP. Hell, everything I've seen from HP concerning pre-sales and post-sales support sucks. My company recently transitioned to HP based desktops/laptops. Our reps are not responsive, support is kind of bad, etc.. We have top tier support and we are a largish company with 50K people in US alone and over 100K worldwide. This is a big and fairly important contract I'd think, even for a company as large as HP.

At this point, the main reason my management does not want to consider Lefthand seriously is that they are now HP. Our desktop/laptop issues may not translate to SANs or Servers, but it still shows you something about the company in general and their approach to the Enterprise.

love truncheon
Feb 1, 2006
toot toot!

H110Hawk posted:

Seems to be the standard Sun way of doing business.

Bit of a side track here, but its worth mentioning that Sun are by far the shittiest vendor in Australia. All the storage at work is (unfortunately) Sun, including 1 massive 100% uptime SAN I wont identify here.

So far the storage has been ok (you might be in luck!), apart from the fact that low model storage (6140 style) has no way to replace the (redundant!) cache batteries without turning your storage off.

The problem is that sun support is just a loving joke. And you'll be using it too with the frequency that sun products poo poo themselves. If its not too late, ask Sun for written assurances that they have spare disks available within your support time frame. Take great care with your support contract - by default suns 4 hour parts replacement is 4 hours from when they agree to replace the part, not 4 hours from fault lodgement.

skullone
Jan 28, 2009

bbatter posted:

Bit of a side track here, but its worth mentioning that Sun are by far the shittiest vendor in Australia. All the storage at work is (unfortunately) Sun, including 1 massive 100% uptime SAN I wont identify here.

So far the storage has been ok (you might be in luck!), apart from the fact that low model storage (6140 style) has no way to replace the (redundant!) cache batteries without turning your storage off.

The problem is that sun support is just a loving joke. And you'll be using it too with the frequency that sun products poo poo themselves. If its not too late, ask Sun for written assurances that they have spare disks available within your support time frame. Take great care with your support contract - by default suns 4 hour parts replacement is 4 hours from when they agree to replace the part, not 4 hours from fault lodgement.

You guys are scaring me... I already have a drive with predictive failure on my Sun box. Haven't reported it to Sun yet... but now I'm thinking "this RAID-Z set with hot spares isn't look as good as RAID-Z2 anymore"

I pretty much fired our Sun reseller last night, and I'm trying to find a new rep at Sun to get us the stuff we need.
Siiiigh.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

skullone posted:

You guys are scaring me... I already have a drive with predictive failure on my Sun box. Haven't reported it to Sun yet... but now I'm thinking "this RAID-Z set with hot spares isn't look as good as RAID-Z2 anymore"

I pretty much fired our Sun reseller last night, and I'm trying to find a new rep at Sun to get us the stuff we need.
Siiiigh.
Give Joe Morgan at MTM Technologies (jmorgan@fakesubdomain.seriouslyremovethis.mtm.com) a shout, he does good things for us.

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

skullone posted:

You guys are scaring me... I already have a drive with predictive failure on my Sun box. Haven't reported it to Sun yet... but now I'm thinking "this RAID-Z set with hot spares isn't look as good as RAID-Z2 anymore"

It's a lot cheaper to keep a sata disk on hand than it is to replace dead data. Just buy a Hitachi/Seagate disk of correct size for your array. It costs, what, $150? Swap it in, deal with Sun, swap their part in.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Well, we've been hosed.

We went through a lengthy selection process between HP (MSA 2012i), Netapp (FAS2020) and EMC (AX4). We decided on Netapp, and were planning on buying it through PC Mall. Midway through the process, though, we started getting frightened by how little our PC Mall rep actually knew the product line (e.g. told us the FAS2020 had 20 drive bays instead of 12, told us it didn't do deduplication when it does, etc), so we took our quote from PC Mall to our trusted local VAR, played matchmaker with him and Netapp (they previously had a bad relationship) so that we could get the same pricing we were getting through PC Mall, but buy it from someone who wasn't an idiot.

So all is well and good, our local VAR gets the same pricing and we buy the unit. It arrived yesterday, we unboxed it and found out... it only has one controller in it. Despite a dual-controller configuration being talked about in all of our conversations with PC Mall, their quotes had always listed the following part numbers

code:
FAS2020-R5
DOC-2020-C
FAS2020-NS-12-X287A-R5-C
FAS2020-NS-BASE-R5-C
X5518A-R6-C
X800E-R6-C
SW-T1-ISCSI-C
SW-T1-SRESTORE-S-C
CS-A-INST-4R
SW-SDRIVE
SW-SDR-WIN
SW-SSP-SDR-WINDOWS
Apparently the lack of a -C on the first line means single-controller. PC Mall screwed this up, their Netapp distributor (Arrow, who we talked to for a few hours on the phone and clearly knew we wanted a dual-controller unit) screwed this up, and the error transferred over to our local VAR uncaught when he recreated the quote and matched the price.

So, the question is, what do we do now? We went with the Netapp for good reasons, and don't want to return it, but it isn't the device we thought it would be. Netapp has said they'll sell our VAR a second controller for $7400, and we could get it for that price, but I'm not even sure if that's a good deal. Anyone with access to Netapp pricing know if we're getting hosed there again, or if they're actually trying to bend over backwards for us like they assure us they are?

rage-saq
Mar 21, 2001

Thats so ninja...

Mierdaan posted:

Well, we've been hosed.
<stuff>

Reason number 5234634 to not deal with those big fullfilment warehouses like CDW, PC-Mall etc for configs.
The guy you are talking to really has no clue about any high level technical stuff, he's just a guy that knows sales stuff and is 'good with computers'. Always always always hire a consultant to come out and do the design/config work for you, its not free but at least it will be right and you will have significant recourse if they screw up the config.
Because you took your PC-Mall config which was hosed up, directly to another vendor who didn't have any part in the config, you are pretty much hosed.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Yeah, I know. Thankfully we're not the kind of shop that loses billions of dollars for every hour of downtime or anything, so the idea of running with a single-controller unit doesn't keep me up at night. We probably wouldn't even see any performance boost from a second controller unless we add more shelves, correct?

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
You won't; but at the same time if your head goes you lose access to all of your data.

Why didn't your VAR pick up on this? Are they an authorized NetApp reseller? I might question them in regards to why they didn't go through PCMall's parts list with a fine toothed comb.

That said, why the 2020 instead of the 2050?

Anyway, a second head will cost you ~7500ish if I recall. Chat with your VAR and maybe they can cut you a "pity" discount but don't count on it.

Worse come to worst, contact NetApp directly and complain. Explain to them that you explicitly laid out your requirements and were sold something different.

In the future, don't buy storage from the internet equivalent of Best Buy. Even if you don't hire a consultant, find a VAR thats authorized by netapp and if need be, take the quote back to netapp to make sure you're getting what you expected.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
It was a strange situation. Our VAR is normally very good, and when we initially approached them they stated outright that if we wanted Netapp, we should probably go somewhere else, as he felt like his pricing through his existing supplier wasn't at all competitive.

In the middle of the process, when we wanted to ditch PC Mall, we got contacted by a local Netapp rep. We put that guy in contact directly with our VAR so they could get better pricing to our VAR, and that was most of our VAR's work on this. We basically gave him our (already hosed-up) PC Mall quote, and said "get this configuration with this price and we'll buy it through you." So that's what he did, the error just propagated unnoticed.

I know our VAR isn't putting a markup on the controller at the price he gave us; that's what Netapp is selling it to him for.

Mierdaan fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 29, 2009

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

1000101 posted:

You won't; but at the same time if your head goes you lose access to all of your data.

Why didn't your VAR pick up on this? Are they an authorized NetApp reseller? I might question them in regards to why they didn't go through PCMall's parts list with a fine toothed comb.

That said, why the 2020 instead of the 2050?

Anyway, a second head will cost you ~7500ish if I recall. Chat with your VAR and maybe they can cut you a "pity" discount but don't count on it.

Worse come to worst, contact NetApp directly and complain. Explain to them that you explicitly laid out your requirements and were sold something different.

In the future, don't buy storage from the internet equivalent of Best Buy. Even if you don't hire a consultant, find a VAR thats authorized by netapp and if need be, take the quote back to netapp to make sure you're getting what you expected.

I don't think 2020 can do clustering, you have to pony up to 2050 for that. At least that's what I recall when we last got a few of each for remote offices. 2050 is basically almost 2x the size and has space for 2 internal controllers and 20 drives.

Catch 22
Dec 1, 2003
Damn it, Damn it, Damn it!

rage-saq posted:

always always hire a consultant to come out and do the design/config work for you, its not free but at least it will be right and you will have significant recourse if they screw up the config.
EMC came right out, sat down, gave options, and ran performance metrics for a week, and worked with my VAR to ensure I got what we wanted/needed, and checked the final quote before the order after I told my VAR to order.

This was totally free, and not even on a big order.

This is another reason I love EMC.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

oblomov posted:

I don't think 2020 can do clustering, you have to pony up to 2050 for that. At least that's what I recall when we last got a few of each for remote offices. 2050 is basically almost 2x the size and has space for 2 internal controllers and 20 drives.

It supports clustering. We had to upgrade one of our client's 2020's to support it but it does work. The only fault with the 2020 is that its basically a dead end platform. The 2050 is generally a much better fit for people and has a lot more expandability.

oblomov
Jun 20, 2002

Meh... #overrated

1000101 posted:

It supports clustering. We had to upgrade one of our client's 2020's to support it but it does work. The only fault with the 2020 is that its basically a dead end platform. The 2050 is generally a much better fit for people and has a lot more expandability.

What do you do then, just get another 2020 and cluster the two? 2050 has capability to do clustering within single chassis.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
There's a second slot in the back for a second head in a 2020 as well.

http://www.netapp.com/us/products/storage-systems/fas2000/fas2000-tech-specs.html

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug

1000101 posted:

It supports clustering. We had to upgrade one of our client's 2020's to support it but it does work. The only fault with the 2020 is that its basically a dead end platform. The 2050 is generally a much better fit for people and has a lot more expandability.

Worst case you can turn a 2020 head into a dumb shelf of disks for a 2050, I'm pretty sure. We were moving to this from a few ProLiant ML350s with four 72GB drives in RAID5, on a shoestring budget, so... it may not seem expandable to you, but it's like the Promised Land for us.

brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.
I just saw an article about Pillar Data laying off 30% of their workforce.. and here I am with 100k to spend on a SAN and can't even get them to return my phone call. Anyone using Lefthand VSA in production? It sounds very cool and scary at the same time.

brent78 fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Feb 4, 2009

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

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

brent78 posted:

I just saw an article about Pillar Data laying off 30% of their workforce.. and here I am with 100k to spend on a SAN and can't even get them to return my phone call. Anyone using Lefthand VSA in production? It sounds very cool and scary at the same time.

I'm using Lefthand boxes, but not the VSA. Unless you got storage already to virtualize, I'd proably go with the phsyical boxes. For 100k you can get several nodes to increase performance and fault tolerance.

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bmoyles
Feb 15, 2002

United Neckbeard Foundation of America
Fun Shoe
100k might not get you much SAN from Pillar...
I'd recommend checking out Compellent, too, but again, 100k is going to be a somewhat small SAN.

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