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conntrack
Aug 8, 2003

by angerbeet
On the notion on replicating/shipping tape to DR as recovery. People to it because it's simple and low cost.

Simple in the way that no "magic" is involved. You get the lowest paid monkey to
follow a check list. If there is any problems he can solve them. poo poo tons of software and scripts for automated recovery can go wrong and you get the monkey calling you for everything. No need to stretch vlans, maintain virtualisation platforms and so on.

Would i do this for 50 servers? Not likely. Just because your mission critical webstore selling plastic vaginas need 24/7 uptime doesn't mean a tape based DR plan is retarded.

I hear about a lot of people that buy expensive as hell array based sync replication and think this will save them from everything including alien invasion.

When bob mongo formats that production volume or that odd app starts corrupting it's database it won't help if you get the format and corruption replicated 100 miles down the road.

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Mako
Apr 22, 2001

Does anyone happen to know anything about DataDomain licensing?

We have a couple DD's that have small (250GB drives) in them. Is it possible to put larger (1TB) for example drives in and be able to use them all in the filesystem?

Do i have to buy the drives FROM datadomain or can i just get any old drive from newegg?

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Mako posted:

Does anyone happen to know anything about DataDomain licensing?

We have a couple DD's that have small (250GB drives) in them. Is it possible to put larger (1TB) for example drives in and be able to use them all in the filesystem?

Do i have to buy the drives FROM datadomain or can i just get any old drive from newegg?

You'd have to buy them from Data Domain, like many vendors DD/EMC only let you put their drives in the array.

Not saying it wouldn't work - I have no idea about that side of things but if they found the drives (by going to swap another drive, or by the newegg drive messing up the array) your maintenance would be void.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

Noghri_ViR posted:

So did anyone pay attention to the emc new product announcements today. What are your thoughts on them? I was about to rule them in out new purchase but now I'm going to take a second look

I didn't bother with it, but I heard something about them stuffing a bunch of hook^H^H^H^H dancers in a Mini Cooper, and jumping a motorcycle over a bunch of Symmetrix cabinets... Sounds like a lot of fluff with not much substance to me.

That said, having not watched it, I don't know if there was any substance, but if I'm going to take my time to watch a webcast, I want to know what the product is, what it does, and how it does it. If I wanna watch stunts, I'll do that another time.

In other news, has anyone recently done a comparison between Compellent and 3PAR?

I haven't gotten even budgetary quotes from either of them yet, but both seem to have nice feature sets. Once I get some base numbers, if they're affordable, I'll probably ask for a demo unit from each of them.

Intraveinous fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jan 24, 2011

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Intraveinous posted:

I didn't bother with it, but I heard something about them stuffing a bunch of hook^H^H^H^H dancers in a Mini Cooper, and jumping a motorcycle over a bunch of Symmetrix cabinets... Sounds like a lot of fluff with not much substance to me.

That said, having not watched it, I don't know if there was any substance, but if I'm going to take my time to watch a webcast, I want to know what the product is, what it does, and how it does it. If I wanna watch stunts, I'll do that another time.


The most significant announcement for me was what I was just talking about a few posts up: the announcement of the VNXe line. What you are looking at is an SMB or ROBO kit with extremely rich features for the price point. It isnt for the enterprise because the software layer really tries to abstract some of the more granular control away from the user but they actually market that as a selling point for the SMB. Price point is pretty amazing. You can actually price a unit with non-redundant controllers for under 10k.

Nukelear v.2
Jun 25, 2004
My optional title text

Syano posted:

The most significant announcement for me was what I was just talking about a few posts up: the announcement of the VNXe line. What you are looking at is an SMB or ROBO kit with extremely rich features for the price point. It isnt for the enterprise because the software layer really tries to abstract some of the more granular control away from the user but they actually market that as a selling point for the SMB. Price point is pretty amazing. You can actually price a unit with non-redundant controllers for under 10k.

As someone who builds cheap small vmware environments using md3000i's I'm pretty excited to have dedupe in a cabinet that's in my target price range. Of course, that assumes the two controller version is only twice the price of the single.

Also, if I'm reading the specs right it claims active/active which I'm hoping means no lun controller ownership.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Intraveinous posted:

I didn't bother with it, but I heard something about them stuffing a bunch of hook^H^H^H^H dancers in a Mini Cooper, and jumping a motorcycle over a bunch of Symmetrix cabinets... Sounds like a lot of fluff with not much substance to me.

That said, having not watched it, I don't know if there was any substance, but if I'm going to take my time to watch a webcast, I want to know what the product is, what it does, and how it does it. If I wanna watch stunts, I'll do that another time.

There were something like 41 new products announced, some big, some insignificant. I think later on they were obviously just counting for ramping up sake.

High End

--Sub Lun Fully Automated storage tiering announced for the VMAX. Moved chunks of data around in 7.5MB chunks from Solid state drives, to FC or slower 1TB ot 2TB drives. Been waiting about 18 months for that one!

Mid Range

--New Mid Range arrays – VMX Range. Mostly a hardware upgrade, up to 1000 drives, new FAST Cache limits of up to 2TB. New 6 Core Intel CPUs, 6GB SAS Backend,
New software features such as application provisioning. For example give it exchange info such as mailboes, size, etc and it will provision the disk based on MS best practice.

Built in GUI tools such as power output, etc.

Low end

--New Low end arrays – VMXe Range, starting at sub-10k. Up to 120 drives. Cheap, lots of good bits.

Data Domain / Backup

--New Data Domain Range – DD890 and DD860 Appliances. Bigger and faster than previous range. Can store up to 14.2 Petabytes logical at a rate of at almost 15TB per hour.

--Also new DD890 as global dedup array. Up to 28.5PB logical at 26TB per hour.

--Native support for IBM iSeries announced.

--Data Domain archiver announced. Now use the DD as long term archive in addition to backup – directly archive through CIFS or NFS.

Blame Pyrrhus
May 6, 2003

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Pillbug
What would you guys recommend for a simple to setup 50TB storage device? Performance really isn't an issue as it is basically just warehousing data, and will really only be accessed by one host.


I checked out both the NetApp and EMC site to look at products but honestly it kind of makes my head spin. I would much rather seek a recommendation and start from there.

conntrack
Aug 8, 2003

by angerbeet

Linux Nazi posted:

What would you guys recommend for a simple to setup 50TB storage device? Performance really isn't an issue as it is basically just warehousing data, and will really only be accessed by one host.


I checked out both the NetApp and EMC site to look at products but honestly it kind of makes my head spin. I would much rather seek a recommendation and start from there.


HP P2000 G3 is cheapish. Don't buy the hp tech install option though.

EnergizerFellow
Oct 11, 2005

More drunk than a barrel of monkeys

Linux Nazi posted:

What would you guys recommend for a simple to setup 50TB storage device? Performance really isn't an issue as it is basically just warehousing data, and will really only be accessed by one host.
If you don't care about performance and just want lots of dirt cheap storage, look into a Dell PowerVault MD3200i iSCSI array with 2-3+ MD1200 trays hanging off it, fully loaded with 2TB 7K drives. The MSRP is expensive enough (~$45K) that you will want to call a Dell sales rep to get competitive commercial pricing.

Blame Pyrrhus
May 6, 2003

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Pillbug
Both good ideas, we get dealer pricing on HP equipment so I may take a closer look at the StorageWorks options.

Thanks a lot fellas.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole
From using some of the IOPS calculators, am I correct in that 10K SAS disks in RAID-10 will provide better IOPS than 15K SAS disks in RAID-5?

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

three posted:

From using some of the IOPS calculators, am I correct in that 10K SAS disks in RAID-10 will provide better IOPS than 15K SAS disks in RAID-5?

Depends but yes, is quite possible.

In a read environment you can get around 130 IOPS (worst case) of random read IO from a 10k disk and 180 IO from a 15k disk.

However, once you add writes into the equation then you are upping the number of IOPS. Each write in RAID 10 creates 2 IOPS (write to one disk then the other). Each write in a RAID 5 environment means 4 IOPS (two reads to make a parity and two writes to write the parity).

So a RAID 5 environment you may have faster disks but it's possible a lot more IOPS are required for the RAID 5 overhead.

Vanilla fucked around with this message at 12:03 on Jan 26, 2011

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

Vanilla posted:

Depends but yes, is quite possible.

In a read environment you can get around 130 IOPS (worst case) of random read IO from a 10k disk and 180 IO from a 15k disk.

However, once you add writes into the equation then you are upping the number of IOPS. Each write in RAID 10 creates 2 IOPS (write to one disk then the other). Each write in a RAID 5 environment means 4 IOPS (two reads to make a parity and two writes to write the parity).

So a RAID 5 environment you may have faster disks but it's possible a lot more IOPS are required for the RAID 5 overhead.

Awesome. We have a spare 10K Equallogic unit, and we have our currently virtual desktops on 15K disks in RAID-5, so I think 10K disks in RAID-10 shouldn't create any problems (or maybe even help).

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

What solution did you end up using for Virtual Desktops? How happy are you with it?

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

skipdogg posted:

What solution did you end up using for Virtual Desktops? How happy are you with it?

We're using VMware View, and we're pretty happy with it. It definitely takes a decent amount of getting used to and learning how things should work, and training desktop support technicians in getting comfortable with supporting it.

As far as the technology goes, PCoIP isn't quite as good as HDX (XenDesktop), but it has a lot of potential... and everything else about View is much better than XenDesktop (which has a very cobbled together feel), in my opinion.

Our users are much happier with their virtual desktops, as well. Every single person we migrated over during our pilot preferred their experience with VDI over their physical desktop (which was, to be fair, slightly older), and none wanted to be moved back to physical.

To relate this back to storage: storage is the #1 bottleneck people run into with VDI. We've been using Equallogic units, and we plan to add more units to our group to increase IOPS/Capacity as needed. (Currently our users are on the same SAN(s) as our server virtualization, and this is why I want to move them to their own group.)

Mausi
Apr 11, 2006

three posted:

To relate this back to storage: storage is the #1 bottleneck people run into with VDI. We've been using Equallogic units, and we plan to add more units to our group to increase IOPS/Capacity as needed. (Currently our users are on the same SAN(s) as our server virtualization, and this is why I want to move them to their own group.)

There is a joke amongst the VMware PSO guys who deal with VDI that you can spot a VDI noob by the way storage isn't the first section of their design.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

Vanilla posted:

However, once you add writes into the equation then you are upping the number of IOPS. Each write in RAID 10 creates 2 IOPS (write to one disk then the other). Each write in a RAID 5 environment means 4 IOPS (two reads to make a parity and two writes to write the parity).
This isn't necessarily true -- properly-sized, properly-aligned writes that consume the full stripe width have 2 write IOPS and no read IOPS. This is better advice for databases, though; you have no good disk performance either way with VDI.

Xenomorph
Jun 13, 2001

Misogynist posted:

The issues you've had with existing storage were mostly due to you ignoring SH/SC telling you to replace them a year ago and finding bizarre justifications to keep trucking along on your broken and unsupportable kit, IIRC

Well, buying the new NX3000 is the first step in replacing our old stuff. However, our old stuff still works, and I've been asked repeatedly by higher-ups why I'm so eager to just get rid of it and buy new stuff that will do the same thing.
I was able to take one old Apple Xraid offline, and they let me buy a new Dell RAID unit. The one Xraid we took offline is now spare drives for the others. So when they start failing, I will be allowed to buy another Dell RAID.

szlevi posted:

If you can wait new NX models, sporting the new Storage Server 2008 R2 etc, are coming in 2-3 weeks.

Any more info on this? At first I didn't think it would be a problem, but after using 2008 R2 on our Domain Controller, using regular 2008 feels a little "off" (basically going from Win7 back to Vista).

Besides the slightly improved interface, what advantages does Storage Server 2008 R2 offer? SMB 2.1? How much better is that than 2.0?

I'm not even familiar with the "Storage Server" product. I saw something to enable Single Instance Store (de-duplication) on the drive, which I'm guessing isn't in the regular Server products.
I'm tempted to just wipe Storage Server 2008 and install Server 2008 R2. We get Windows licenses cheap, and I'm trying to figure out if we'd be happier with the overall improvements in Server 2008 R2 compared to the NAS features we may not use in Storage Server 2008.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Not an enterprise storage question, but screw it, it's quick and I couldn't find a more appropriate place to put it:

I'm trying to benchmark the performance difference between RAID-5 and RAID-6 on an LSI MegaSAS 9260. I created a RAID-5 with 9 2TB disks, and a RAID-6 with 10 2TB disks, and the RAID-6 is showing up with 2TB more space than the RAID-5 when they should be an identical size. Anyone have any clue what's up and why this controller is being retarded?

Edit: Never mind, stupid piece of poo poo left itself 2 TB of free space in the array for no reason. I didn't tell it to do that.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jan 27, 2011

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Speaking of benchmarking, what's everyone using? I'm trying to use iozone to benchmark a few particular RAID controllers, and I'm having a hell of a time with it. I'm getting performance differences of up to 300% on certain benchmarks on identical runs.

Nomex
Jul 17, 2002

Flame retarded.

three posted:

We're using VMware View, and we're pretty happy with it. It definitely takes a decent amount of getting used to and learning how things should work, and training desktop support technicians in getting comfortable with supporting it.

As far as the technology goes, PCoIP isn't quite as good as HDX (XenDesktop), but it has a lot of potential... and everything else about View is much better than XenDesktop (which has a very cobbled together feel), in my opinion.

Our users are much happier with their virtual desktops, as well. Every single person we migrated over during our pilot preferred their experience with VDI over their physical desktop (which was, to be fair, slightly older), and none wanted to be moved back to physical.

To relate this back to storage: storage is the #1 bottleneck people run into with VDI. We've been using Equallogic units, and we plan to add more units to our group to increase IOPS/Capacity as needed. (Currently our users are on the same SAN(s) as our server virtualization, and this is why I want to move them to their own group.)

We did a pilot with the actual machines running off a FusionIO 320GB drive, with all the user data offloaded to an HP EVA. The virtual desktops would load at freakish speed. I would definitely recommend hosting the VMs on solid state storage if you're going the View route.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th
Hey guys, came across someone asking for 'server offload backup solutions'. Never heard this terminology before? Are they talking about clones for backup??

Mausi
Apr 11, 2006

Vanilla posted:

Hey guys, came across someone asking for 'server offload backup solutions'. Never heard this terminology before? Are they talking about clones for backup??
I'm not sure how well this translates to the wider storage community, but where I work in virtualisation that terminology basically means the 'processing' of the backup is done by a server other than the backup source without impacting on the cpu/memory etc of that source server. This implies that there isn't a local agent using the cpu to work out differentials or compression or anything like that, so usually the only impact is:
Local storage: disk io and network io
SAN storage: effective disk io on the SAN

In virtualisation terms, this means that the hypervisor doesn't have any involvement in backup processing, and by extension isn't dedicating resources to backup which could be used by another virtual guest. The short explanation is another server connects to the SAN, tells the hypervisor that it's taking a copy of the disk and let's it know when it's finished (it's more complicated than that, but I won't bore you).
It doesn't have to be LUN level copying from a SAN, but that's a common solution.

hackedaccount
Sep 28, 2009

Vanilla posted:

Hey guys, came across someone asking for 'server offload backup solutions'. Never heard this terminology before? Are they talking about clones for backup??

Most likely yes, clones. Mirror your poo poo on shared storage, split the mirror at night, mount the copy on a dedicated server, do backups from the dedicated server, repeat for next box. I've only seen this on large, powerful, important system (usually SAP, Oracle, DB2, etc) and never on web/file/print type servers.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th
Thanks for the reply guys, I understand what they're after now.

Demonachizer
Aug 7, 2004
So I just got out of a meeting with a vendor and we are going with a two site lefthand SAN solution but they were trying to sell us on a RAID 1 setup which I have never heard of. It is either RAID 10 or 5 if I am correct? We are probably going with RAID 5 mirrored between the two sites (one site is just for failover). That seems like the best but just want to get any insight if you guys have some. This SAN will be running our VMs as well as being file storage. What do you guys see as pricing for the P4300 14.4tb these days?

Demonachizer fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Feb 3, 2011

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

demonachizer posted:

So I just got out of a meeting with a vendor and we are going with a two site lefthand SAN solution but they were trying to sell us on a RAID 1 setup which I have never heard of. It is either RAID 10 or 5 if I am correct?

Raid 1 is just mirrored. So if you have 2 drives that are 1tb each, they will mirror eachother, giving you 1tb of storage, and the ability for one drive to die.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
So this isn't quite Enterprise level, but if anyone has a Sun StorageTek 2510 (or I guess any 25xx array) I've found a fun little bug (confirmed by an engineer). The batteries have a tendency to very quickly "expire," but resetting the battery age fixes it, until the battery goes into an error state.

Of course our ~9 month old battery says it's over 6.5 years old, so maybe our array is just well and truly hosed.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Moey posted:

Raid 1 is just mirrored. So if you have 2 drives that are 1tb each, they will mirror eachother, giving you 1tb of storage, and the ability for one drive to die.

Its a bit more complicated than that. Lefthand units do something they call network raid which means your lun is mirrored across units and not just disks.

Demonachizer
Aug 7, 2004

Moey posted:

Raid 1 is just mirrored. So if you have 2 drives that are 1tb each, they will mirror eachother, giving you 1tb of storage, and the ability for one drive to die.

No I know what RAID 1 is but I am just not sure I have heard of a SAN that uses that as their RAID solution especially since there are going to be shitloads of disks involved. Normally you hear of a RAID 10. We acted confused then they seemed unsure of themselves so I just was wondering if that is a configuration that lefthand has available.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

demonachizer posted:

No I know what RAID 1 is but I am just not sure I have heard of a SAN that uses that as their RAID solution especially since there are going to be shitloads of disks involved. Normally you hear of a RAID 10. We acted confused then they seemed unsure of themselves so I just was wondering if that is a configuration that lefthand has available.

Read my above post. They may have been talking about network raid 1, especially if they are selling you a dual unit kit

ozmunkeh
Feb 28, 2008

hey guys what is happening in this thread

Syano posted:

Its a bit more complicated than that. Lefthand units do something they call network raid which means your lun is mirrored across units and not just disks.

Yeah, assuming you're using two units, the drives themselves are going to be in a RAID5 (maybe 10 depending on your requirements) within each unit but those units will essentially be a RAID1 (for volumes you configure as mirrored). The last time I spoke with them they suggested adding a third unit and configuring the drives internally as RAID0. No idea what their "network raid" equivalent would do then with three units - 5 I guess.

ragzilla
Sep 9, 2005
don't ask me, i only work here


Anyone here have any experience with CommVault SnapProtect? In particular, can it quiesce and SAN snap raw RDMs presented to VMs?

conntrack
Aug 8, 2003

by angerbeet

ragzilla posted:

Anyone here have any experience with CommVault SnapProtect? In particular, can it quiesce and SAN snap raw RDMs presented to VMs?

Ask me in 6 months :) The sales person became a man of few words when we asked questions like this and the online documentation is somewhat sparse.

Please do post what you find out if you do.

Demonachizer
Aug 7, 2004

Syano posted:

Read my above post. They may have been talking about network raid 1, especially if they are selling you a dual unit kit

Yeah he was saying internally RAID 1 though which was weird to us... I understand mirroring across network etc. but in the box it has to be 10 or 5 I thought.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

Misogynist posted:

Speaking of benchmarking, what's everyone using? I'm trying to use iozone to benchmark a few particular RAID controllers, and I'm having a hell of a time with it. I'm getting performance differences of up to 300% on certain benchmarks on identical runs.

I did a lot of testing with iozone last summer and had pretty consistent results across identical runs. What options are you running it with?

My standard baseline run is:
iozone -b baseline.xls -r 1m -s 8g -t 6 -i 0 -i 1 -i 2

Obviously adjust your -r for block size you want to test and -s to make sure it's large enough to take cache out of the picture. I've seen the most variance with different -t settings, since it simulates the queue depth, e.g., I was able to see large difference at high queue depth between drives that were otherwise identical with the exception of having SATA or SAS connections. I tested identical arrays made up of Seagate Constellation ES 1TB drives, 6x SATA and 6x SAS. Only difference between them was that the SAS version supported 6Gb SAS, but I was using a 3Gb SAS/SATA RAID card, so that shouldn't matter. There was a very definite drop off of performance on the SATA drives above a certain setting for -t. I don't have the results handy to know what that number was, sorry. Even then though, I'd see very similar results between runs, all else being equal.

HTH

wang souffle
Apr 26, 2002
Anyone have experience with Oracle/Sun's Unified Storage Systems? Looking into the 7120 model at the moment as an alternative to a NetApp FAS2040.

wang souffle fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Feb 7, 2011

EnergizerFellow
Oct 11, 2005

More drunk than a barrel of monkeys

wang souffle posted:

Anyone have experience with Oracle/Sun's Unified Storage Systems? Looking into the 7120 model at the moment as an alternative to a NetApp FAS2040.
What kind of usable capacity do you need? What kind of uptime? Disk IOps? Connectivity?

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wang souffle
Apr 26, 2002

EnergizerFellow posted:

What kind of usable capacity do you need? What kind of uptime? Disk IOps? Connectivity?
10TB would be plenty. Uptime is not a critical factor. IOps--not sure, but we will rely on this for developer home directories (ie, many small writes from SVN). NFS/CIFS/iSCSI would cover all bases.

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