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amishpurple
Jul 21, 2006

I'm not insane, I'm just not user-friendly!

FISHMANPET posted:

Thoughts on Compellent? We just had a meeting a Dell rep. It all sounds pretty awesome, if it works.

Odds are we're going to go with a JBOD attached to a server because we're dumb, but it looks cool.

The PO for our Compellent just went out today. We chose them over NetApp and EMC and I can't wait to get it in. We got 156 spindles coming!

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Demonachizer
Aug 7, 2004
So there are 8 drive configuration options apparently on the equallogic PS4000 SANs. I am just wondering if you have 16 drives can you do a hot spare and then a RAID 50 out of the remaining 15 discs (3 sub RAID 5 with 5 discs each) or do you have to keep an even number of drives with two hot spares and 14 drives?

Demonachizer fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jun 9, 2011

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

amishpurple posted:

The PO for our Compellent just went out today. We chose them over NetApp and EMC and I can't wait to get it in. We got 156 spindles coming!

Enjoy it, we've got 88 (64x146GB 15K, 24x2TB 7.2K) and so far, it's speedy as all hell. 3PAR went all ball baby when we mentioned Compellent. Netapp reseller immediately started talking bad about their technology, then came back with a new quote that was 30% below their previous "best and final", but we still ended up with the CML.

Intraveinous fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jun 9, 2011

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
I have a feeling we'll end up going with JBODs attached to servers and using ZFS, but me and the guy who would mostly be running it are really excited.

Meanwhile my boss is trying to get them to donate some old crap (University department) to use to retire some super old (36 GB SCSI disk arrays) and then maybe buy a few more things to add on and ???

We don't really have a plan.

We've also been burned on a black box like this before, because we got really unlucky and bought a NAS from Sun/StorageTek which they almost immediatly EOLed, and when a Sun techs came into our machine room to work on something else, he saw that and literally started banging his head on the wall.

So we've got a hard time trusting a black box.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

demonachizer posted:

So there are 8 drive configuration options apparently on the equallogic PS4000 SANs. I am just wondering if you have 16 drives can you do a hot spare and then a RAID 50 out of the remaining 15 discs (3 sub RAID 5 with 5 discs each) or do you have to keep an even number of drives with two hot spares and 14 drives?

Equallogic requires 1 hot spare per 8 drives, so a 16 drive config will have 14 available drives, and can easily do a big RAID 50, but it does it as pair of raid 5's, not a group of 3 raid 5's.

amishpurple
Jul 21, 2006

I'm not insane, I'm just not user-friendly!

Intraveinous posted:

Enjoy it, we've got 88 (64x146GB 15K, 24x2TB 7.2K) and so far, it's speedy as all hell. 3PAR went all ball baby when we mentioned Compellent. Netapp reseller immediately started talking bad about their technology, then came back with a new quote that was 30% below their previous "best and final", but we still ended up with the CML.

Funny you mention that, NetApp did the same thing offering us another quote after the "best and final." Compellent still came back and beat it. NetApp is solid and I would have been happy with them too, but I truly did like Compellent better and I'm happy we ended up buying them.

Noghri_ViR
Oct 19, 2001

Your party has died.
Please press [ENTER] to continue to the
Las Vegas Bowl

amishpurple posted:

Funny you mention that, NetApp did the same thing offering us another quote after the "best and final." Compellent still came back and beat it. NetApp is solid and I would have been happy with them too, but I truly did like Compellent better and I'm happy we ended up buying them.

My reseller from Enpointe told me not to take NetApp's 1,2 or 3rd offer. Told me on the 3rd offer to tell them I was looking pretty solid like I was going with EMC. Netapp came back and beat their price once again.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Noghri_ViR posted:

My reseller from Enpointe told me not to take NetApp's 1,2 or 3rd offer. Told me on the 3rd offer to tell them I was looking pretty solid like I was going with EMC. Netapp came back and beat their price once again.
We only bought our netapp because they price matched Sun.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th
So with all the big vendors the salesman is totally in control of the price. The price he will submit depends heavily on the situation and you should never believe the 'best and final' line - It's bullshit.

Are you a huge Netapp fan with money? Hell you'll get a little discount.

Are you a non-Netapp account and in the middle of a refresh which may feature a 'price price price'vendor like Dell? You'll get a great discount. Netapp are under a lot of pressure - they have one revenue stream, a huge growth rate to meet and wall street to please. They will drop the price.

When Dell come up against EMC / Netapp they know they don't have the feature set to match so they just drop the price because often price is the biggest factor.

Some common sense tips:

- Research into when end of quarter is for certain vendors. You will get a better price the closer you leave it to their EoQ.
- Involve multiple vendors in the process and even inform the vendors who you are looking at (but share nothing more).
- When you've reached the point where you think you can't get the price down any more that's fine - move onto other things. You got a great deal - why not secure the same discount levels for your upgrade costs for the next 3 years? This is actually really easy to do because sales people don't see / care that far ahead. They just want that deal.
- Don't believe the 'only valid for this quarter' crap. If you turned up three days into a new quarter and said 'I want to buy this now' they're not going to risk you going elsewhere. If they play hard, play hard back.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

Vanilla posted:

So with all the big vendors the salesman is totally in control of the price. The price he will submit depends heavily on the situation and you should never believe the 'best and final' line - It's bullshit.

Are you a huge Netapp fan with money? Hell you'll get a little discount.

Are you a non-Netapp account and in the middle of a refresh which may feature a 'price price price'vendor like Dell? You'll get a great discount. Netapp are under a lot of pressure - they have one revenue stream, a huge growth rate to meet and wall street to please. They will drop the price.

When Dell come up against EMC / Netapp they know they don't have the feature set to match so they just drop the price because often price is the biggest factor.

Some common sense tips:

- Research into when end of quarter is for certain vendors. You will get a better price the closer you leave it to their EoQ.
- Involve multiple vendors in the process and even inform the vendors who you are looking at (but share nothing more).
- When you've reached the point where you think you can't get the price down any more that's fine - move onto other things. You got a great deal - why not secure the same discount levels for your upgrade costs for the next 3 years? This is actually really easy to do because sales people don't see / care that far ahead. They just want that deal.
- Don't believe the 'only valid for this quarter' crap. If you turned up three days into a new quarter and said 'I want to buy this now' they're not going to risk you going elsewhere. If they play hard, play hard back.

All of this is true, and I didn't mean to make it out as me bashing Netapp or 3PAR's tech, all of them had pros and cons, and I'm sure all of them would have been very capable of doing the job we were needing the array for. There were definitely things about each that I liked better than the others, but all were very capable.

conntrack
Aug 8, 2003

by angerbeet
The compellent system looks cool but the presales from Dell looked miffed when i asked them technical details about their "not mirroring" secret sauce.

This is either them lying/embellishing the truth or they just don't know. Either way it makes them look bad.

Many people are starting the scale out with servers game. Has netapp come up with a counter product/propaganda?

Hok
Apr 3, 2003

Cog in the Machine

conntrack posted:

The compellent system looks cool but the presales from Dell looked miffed when i asked them technical details about their "not mirroring" secret sauce.

This is either them lying/embellishing the truth or they just don't know. Either way it makes them look bad.

Many people are starting the scale out with servers game. Has netapp come up with a counter product/propaganda?

They're sales, so the embellishing the truth bit is standard practice. Having said that, I'd say it's most likely that they just don't know, Compellent is very new to Dell and everyone's still madly trying to get up to speed on it. I've got a heap of training on it still to do on the support side.

As I understand the way they do the RAID (I haven't read up on it in any detail as yet so I might be getting it wrong) is just raiding at the block level rather than the disk level.

If you create a 4+1 raid 5, it will grab 5 blocks off any disks in any enclosure it decides is suitable and raid them, it will then repeat using blocks from other disks until it has a big enough volume. There's some load balancing and optimization smarts behind it, but that's the basics

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Noghri_ViR posted:

My reseller from Enpointe told me not to take NetApp's 1,2 or 3rd offer. Told me on the 3rd offer to tell them I was looking pretty solid like I was going with EMC. Netapp came back and beat their price once again.

If you're dealing directly with NetApp make sure you're getting at least 3 or 4 nice lunches and a little swag out of them as well. The last big purchase we made from them was drat near 50% off list. Remember margins on poo poo like software and support are in the 80% range, there's plenty of room to move on that stuff.

Being able to fast track a PO to get it in before the Q or even fiscal year is a huge thing as well. Those salesmen love their commission and if one needs your deal to go through to hit/beat his plan they'll basically do anything you want.

KS
Jun 10, 2003
Outrageous Lumpwad
I'm glad to hear that everyone else is having good experiences with Compellent too. We bought a pair of them about six months ago to replace some Hitachi arrays and they have been nearly perfect. We are incredibly happy with the performance we're getting, which is good, because I recommended them.

We did have an array go down last month, which was scary, and I might as well throw this out there in case it helps anyone else: if your controllers have 8gig emulex cards in them and you're using brocade switches with 6.3+ firmware, there is a TSB out on Brocade's site warning of incompatibility. It was a very tense Sunday as the array gradually lost connectivity to 50+ servers. The problem appears after a controller reboot, and it took Compellent swapping the cards for Qlogics (in <3 hours) to get us back on our feet.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Hok posted:

If you create a 4+1 raid 5, it will grab 5 blocks off any disks in any enclosure it decides is suitable and raid them, it will then repeat using blocks from other disks until it has a big enough volume. There's some load balancing and optimization smarts behind it, but that's the basics

I'm not 100% on this, but I don't think you even specify you want a 4+1, you just specify that in your tier you want some raid 5 and some raid 10, and the data progression magic figures out how many blocks to to raid 5 and how many to raid 10 so that you get the right speed for your progression. Though I'm not 100% on that, as I wasn't entirely understanding the blocks when he answered my question.

As for support, we're in the twin cites, 20-40 minutes away from Eden Prairie, depending on traffic, so hopefully we won't have any problems getting on site service quickly.

E:

conntrack posted:

The compellent system looks cool but the presales from Dell looked miffed when i asked them technical details about their "not mirroring" secret sauce.

This is either them lying/embellishing the truth or they just don't know. Either way it makes them look bad.

Many people are starting the scale out with servers game. Has netapp come up with a counter product/propaganda?

Our guy new his poo poo. I agree with the poster above, they may just not know yet. The few things our guy didn't know he said he'd forward us the technical docs. Since we're so close, he also offered to set us up with a field trip to HQ so we could interrogate the engineers.

FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jun 11, 2011

Hok
Apr 3, 2003

Cog in the Machine

FISHMANPET posted:

I'm not 100% on this, but I don't think you even specify you want a 4+1, you just specify that in your tier you want some raid 5 and some raid 10, and the data progression magic figures out how many blocks to to raid 5 and how many to raid 10 so that you get the right speed for your progression. Though I'm not 100% on that, as I wasn't entirely understanding the blocks when he answered my question.

I'm still in the early stages of working my way through the training material, so I'm not 100% on it, I'm curious about it so I'll ask the L2 at work who spent a couple of weeks at Compellent doing training, he has some more in depth docs than I've been able to get my hands on so far.

FISHMANPET posted:


As for support, we're in the twin cites, 20-40 minutes away from Eden Prairie, depending on traffic, so hopefully we won't have any problems getting on site service quickly.

The onsite is outsourced, I'm not sure exactly who they use in the US, but here in Oz I've heard it will be the same Unisys or Fujitsu guys Dell use for the rest of their onsite work. They'll probably just train up the guys who currently do the EMC work.

From a hardware point of view it's all pretty generic server hardware, The SAS arrays look a lot like some of the HP ones, and from my understanding there's no reason they couldn't just drop in Dell MD1200/1220 shelves instead. I'm sure the Dell hardware guys are working away at adapting some of the existing server hardware for it. If it wasn't for the need for a heap of PCI slots any of the 2 socket PowerEdges would do just fine.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
I'm having some trouble getting some equipment to work. I've got a Dell H700i SAS Controller running the latest firmware and a Dell branded Seagate Cheetah 15k.5. I can't get the drive to spin up or the H700 to detect it at boot. I'm using a SFF-8087 to 4-Pin SATA connector with an interposer to convert the drives' SAS connector to SATA connectors. The drive powers up when the computer is turned on as evidenced by the green power LED on it. The drive works fine if I shove it in a PE1950 with a PERC5. I should also probably mention that the controller refuses to detect normal SATA drives as well even though the latest firmware removes the dell branding restriction. What am I doing wrong?

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
Ok so we just got our first HP lefthand kit in this Friday and this is the first of this type me or my guys have ever played with. I just assumed before shipping that the three network ports on the back of each unit would be two ports for the storage network and 1 port for the management network. As we were racking everything on Friday though it turns out that the third port is actually for the HP iLO and the management traffic goes over the storage network ports? Is that correct?

Nomex
Jul 17, 2002

Flame retarded.
That's correct. The iLO port is for management of the hardware only. Everything else goes through the two other ports.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy
Goddamnit.

I had a whole set of upgrades all prepped for a maintenance window this sunday, only to start the ball rolling and find my PS4000 threw out two disks last night, with a drive failing to a hot spare, immediately failing that, and landing on the next hot spare. Had to abort the whole process until I get the replacements in. Waste of my time.... :argh:

Intrepid00
Nov 10, 2003

I'm tired of the PM’s asking if I actually poisoned kittens, instead look at these boobies.
Wasn't there a firmware upgrade a while back for the RAID to prevent this or did you really have that much bad hardware?

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Intrepid00 posted:

Wasn't there a firmware upgrade a while back for the RAID to prevent this or did you really have that much bad hardware?

The 5.00 and 5.01 firmwares had major issues with controllers going haywire, but I'm running 4.3.7, which is stable. I was planning to jump to 5.07, which fixes a bunch of management console issues, but I wouldn't do it with two drives down, way too much of a risk.

Just annoyed that it was fine Thursday and decided now to throw this in my face. Next week.

This isn't a rant against the device, which is performing fine, just the timing sucks. I'm not concerned about failed drives, every array will have that sooner or later, and bringing a drive up from standby is the time it's most likely to fail, so I'm not worried about the 1,2 drive failure event, as the second in sequence was one of the spares.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

KS posted:

I'm glad to hear that everyone else is having good experiences with Compellent too. We bought a pair of them about six months ago to replace some Hitachi arrays and they have been nearly perfect. We are incredibly happy with the performance we're getting, which is good, because I recommended them.

We did have an array go down last month, which was scary, and I might as well throw this out there in case it helps anyone else: if your controllers have 8gig emulex cards in them and you're using brocade switches with 6.3+ firmware, there is a TSB out on Brocade's site warning of incompatibility. It was a very tense Sunday as the array gradually lost connectivity to 50+ servers. The problem appears after a controller reboot, and it took Compellent swapping the cards for Qlogics (in <3 hours) to get us back on our feet.

Do you have a link to the TSB? I recently upgraded my brocade switch firmwares, and since then, I'll randomly lose one MPIO link at a time.

Since we're not fully in production on it yet, that hasn't been a problem as of yet, but I'm fairly certain we've got four 4port 8gb Emulex cards.

KS
Jun 10, 2003
Outrageous Lumpwad

Intraveinous posted:

Do you have a link to the TSB? I recently upgraded my brocade switch firmwares, and since then, I'll randomly lose one MPIO link at a time.

Since we're not fully in production on it yet, that hasn't been a problem as of yet, but I'm fairly certain we've got four 4port 8gb Emulex cards.

I don't have a link. You need brocade support THROUGH BROCADE to have access to them, and ours is through Hitachi.

(if you get the tsb, send it to me please!)

KS fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 13, 2011

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

KS posted:

I don't have a link. You need brocade support THROUGH BROCADE to have access to them, and ours is through Hitachi.

This might help though, our Compellent case # for the outage was REDACTED. You may be able to reference this and get them to deliver the TSB, or at least point them in the right direction to fix your issue.

(if you get the tsb, send it to me please!)

YGPM. I'm not finding anything specifically listing Compellent or Emulex card incompatibility at this point.
I'll give CoPilot a call and reference your case # to see if they can give me the TSB #.

Thanks for the heads up.

Intraveinous fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jun 13, 2011

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
This may be better suited to the virtualization thread but whatev I will give it a go here: We are setting up a Xenserver environment on top of HP Lefthand storage. Reading through the best practice guide published by HP they recommend as best practice having 1 VM per 1 volume per 1 storage respository. Is there any reason why?

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

Syano posted:

This may be better suited to the virtualization thread but whatev I will give it a go here: We are setting up a Xenserver environment on top of HP Lefthand storage. Reading through the best practice guide published by HP they recommend as best practice having 1 VM per 1 volume per 1 storage respository. Is there any reason why?

Not sure how Lefthand specifically does it, but often the recommendation for low numbers of VMs per volume/LUN is to avoid issues with SCSI locks during metadata updates. I really wish best practice guides would get into the "Why this is a best practice, and what might happen if you don't follow it" realm more often.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Syano posted:

This may be better suited to the virtualization thread but whatev I will give it a go here: We are setting up a Xenserver environment on top of HP Lefthand storage. Reading through the best practice guide published by HP they recommend as best practice having 1 VM per 1 volume per 1 storage respository. Is there any reason why?

It likely comes from Xenserver not necessarily having access to a clustered filesystem out of the box besides NFS. I THINK it can work with GFS which can allow you to break that rule but I'd check with your Xen vendor's support matrix just in case.

Otherwise you're probably using ext3 which isn't clustered and you'll have to do 1 VM per volume. Otherwise you'd have to migrate ALL the VMs to another box at the same time when you're doing things like XenMotion or experiencing failover, etc.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





That doesn't sound right to me unless I am misunderstanding you. You can have two Xenserver hosts sharing the same data store. That is how they can move VMs from one server to the other. Not sure what the LUNs are formatted with specifically.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Internet Explorer posted:

That doesn't sound right to me unless I am misunderstanding you. You can have two Xenserver hosts sharing the same data store. That is how they can move VMs from one server to the other. Not sure what the LUNs are formatted with specifically.

Edit2:

I think things have changed enough since I last used Xen to safely ignore anything I have to say on the subject!

Thanks for the clarification!


Thats probably why they say 1 VM per volume though.

edit: hard as hell to confirm; but can someone with Xen confirm whether or not 2 or more hosts can have concurrent write access to the same LUN?

1000101 fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jun 16, 2011

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Like I said, maybe I am misunderstanding. I run a small XenServer farm and have a single LUN that is mapped to multiple servers, using iSCSI, and they both can allocate space to it at the same time, both can put vDisks in it, and both can read or write on the vDisks. Obviously they can't write to the same vDisk at the same time, but as far as I know no one can do that if Windows is the guest OS.

So basically it is setup like this:

XenServerGeneric LUN, which has GuestOS1 vDisk, GuestOS2 vDisk, GuestOS3 vDisk. Both hosts, XenServer1 and XenServer2 can access the XenServerGeneric LUN and read/write to vDisks on it.

[Edit: Just remoted in to the XenServer farm in question and XenCenter calls it specifically an iSCSI SR (Storage Repository) and under type it says LVM over iSCSI. But this is presented from our SAN as just a standard iSCSI LUN, so I am assuming LVM is the file system XenServer uses for that. I think locally they use ext3.]

Internet Explorer fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Jun 16, 2011

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
Ive become more curious now. This Xen deployment isnt going to get very large, only 2 hosts and maybe 20 total VMs. However having a separate storage repository for each VM is sort of annoying. I think its time to do some googling.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Internet Explorer posted:

Like I said, maybe I am misunderstanding. I run a small XenServer farm and have a single LUN that is mapped to multiple servers, using iSCSI, and they both can allocate space to it at the same time, both can put vDisks in it, and both can read or write on the vDisks. Obviously they can't write to the same vDisk at the same time, but as far as I know no one can do that if Windows is the guest OS.

So basically it is setup like this:

XenServerGeneric LUN, which has GuestOS1 vDisk, GuestOS2 vDisk, GuestOS3 vDisk. Both hosts, XenServer1 and XenServer2 can access the XenServerGeneric LUN and read/write to vDisks on it.

[Edit: Just remoted in to the XenServer farm in question and XenCenter calls it specifically an iSCSI SR (Storage Repository) and under type it says LVM over iSCSI. But this is presented from our SAN as just a standard iSCSI LUN, so I am assuming LVM is the file system XenServer uses for that. I think locally they use ext3.]

Ah, so its smart enough to let multiple hosts access the LUN but not screw with other VMs! Snazzy and I appreciate your confirming! It's been a few years and most of what I do is in the VMware world.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Any thoughts on Sun's 7000 series, specifically the 7120 or the 7320 (as I imagine that's all that would be in our price range? Most of us are on the Compellent side, but one guy is super on the Oracle side, so we basically have to fight against Oracle for this. Would something like that work well as a VMWare Image store? How much access to the OS does the 7000 series give?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





1000101 posted:

Ah, so its smart enough to let multiple hosts access the LUN but not screw with other VMs! Snazzy and I appreciate your confirming! It's been a few years and most of what I do is in the VMware world.

My pleasure. Just wanted to make sure I was understanding you properly. We are a smaller shop and I am responsible for anything with flashy lights, so I do not spend all day on the virtualization or storage side of things.

Syano posted:

Ive become more curious now. This Xen deployment isnt going to get very large, only 2 hosts and maybe 20 total VMs. However having a separate storage repository for each VM is sort of annoying. I think its time to do some googling.

Our little farm is only 2 servers in production and 2 servers in DR. We also run an older installation of VMware, so XenServer is mostly hosting Citrix infrastructure. I have not noticed an issue with only having one or two storage repositories, and would be interested to hear about how they deal with provisioned XenApp servers or XenDesktop servers. The system drive is provisioned and not going through those iSCSI LUNs, but the cache drive with the pagefile and persistent info is stored all on the same LUN. In a XenDesktop rollout that means you'd have a bunch of those cache drives all in the same LUN. I can't imagine any other way of doing it without blowing your brains out.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005
So I should still be able to do Xenmotion and all the other bells and whistles by putting all my vdisks on a single SR?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Yes. I do it all the time. Works the same way as it does on our VMware ESX 3.5 farm, as far as I know.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists

FISHMANPET posted:

Any thoughts on Sun's 7000 series, specifically the 7120 or the 7320 (as I imagine that's all that would be in our price range? Most of us are on the Compellent side, but one guy is super on the Oracle side, so we basically have to fight against Oracle for this. Would something like that work well as a VMWare Image store? How much access to the OS does the 7000 series give?

The word "Oracle" just leaves a bad taste in my mouth in general. I know it's Sun kit, but once you buy it, you're at the whim of Oracle deciding whether or not to continue supporting it, and honestly, you're not getting much of anything you can't get with a white box (besides Oracle's "outstanding" support [/sarcasm]. I like ZFS, and run white box ZFS implementations both at home and work. I know you said you'd been burned by white box implementations before, so really the questions are: How much time are you going to be able to spend learning the ins and outs to really know the system, and how much turnover do you have in your IT department? If you'll be the primary one supporting the system, and it will be your primary function (so you'll know it like the back of your hand) there's less to fear. If it will be dumped off on a contractor or something, even something with Oracle's support will be better.

I'm not trying to play fanboy for Compellent...

DCIG did a "Midrange Array Buyers Guide" last year. Ranked the Compellent Series 20/30 as "Recommended" or "Excellent" in all fields, and the Sun 7310 as "Entry Level" in all but Software, which it got a "Good".

You can grab it here: https://dcig.wufoo.com/forms/dcig-2010-midrange-array-buyers-guide/?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign= (I'd make sure to have a trash email to give them, since they'll spam the hell out of you.)

I don't know how much stock you put in those kinds of things, but sometimes the glossy marketing stuff is enough to convince the person with the purse strings that you're right.

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Intraveinous posted:

The word "Oracle" just leaves a bad taste in my mouth in general. I know it's Sun kit, but once you buy it, you're at the whim of Oracle deciding whether or not to continue supporting it, and honestly, you're not getting much of anything you can't get with a white box (besides Oracle's "outstanding" support [/sarcasm]. I like ZFS, and run white box ZFS implementations both at home and work. I know you said you'd been burned by white box implementations before, so really the questions are: How much time are you going to be able to spend learning the ins and outs to really know the system, and how much turnover do you have in your IT department? If you'll be the primary one supporting the system, and it will be your primary function (so you'll know it like the back of your hand) there's less to fear. If it will be dumped off on a contractor or something, even something with Oracle's support will be better.

I'm not trying to play fanboy for Compellent...

DCIG did a "Midrange Array Buyers Guide" last year. Ranked the Compellent Series 20/30 as "Recommended" or "Excellent" in all fields, and the Sun 7310 as "Entry Level" in all but Software, which it got a "Good".

You can grab it here: https://dcig.wufoo.com/forms/dcig-2010-midrange-array-buyers-guide/?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign= (I'd make sure to have a trash email to give them, since they'll spam the hell out of you.)

I don't know how much stock you put in those kinds of things, but sometimes the glossy marketing stuff is enough to convince the person with the purse strings that you're right.

It's all very political, of course, but to make it simple...

We've been a Sun shop for about forever. We've gotten burnt by StorageTek (right after Sun bought them) blackbox unit. However, despite that, one of our managers (who used to be the Solaris admin until he got promoted to management, but he's still below our big boss, and shouldn't care, becuase he won't be running it. It also took him 4 years to get our StorageTek NAS into production [yes, 4 years]) wants to keep going the Sun/Oracle route. The guy who actually is going to run it, and me, are in favor of Compellent. We have the money either way most likely, it's just a matter of convincing the big boss that the Oracle solution probably isn't very good. We've also been burned recently by Oracle support, so really not sure why we would even consider it. If the 7000 series is a blackbox, that's a knock against it.

The big boss is basically deciding between Compellent or some Dell servers with MD1200 arrays connected to them, running ZFS. The need to discredit Oracle comes from the third party that has way too much influence.

That White Paper looks good, even if it took some serious drug deals to get a copy of it. The link you posted didn't work, so I snipped the end off and got a registration page, registered and got a link, and that just gave me a header png hosted on dropbox. Googled for the paper, found the link on the DCIG site, registered with NEXSAN, the link they gave me 404ed, googled the file name, and found a copy: http://www.adn.de/media/CMS_Bilder/Nexsan/2010_DCIG_Midrange_Array_Buyers_Guide.pdf

I'll have to keep an eye out for the 2011 buyer's guide.

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Mausi
Apr 11, 2006

Syano posted:

Ive become more curious now. This Xen deployment isnt going to get very large, only 2 hosts and maybe 20 total VMs. However having a separate storage repository for each VM is sort of annoying. I think its time to do some googling.
You can put multiple guest VMs on a single LUN shared between multiple XenServer hosts - even HyperV can do this now. Don't worry about what linux FS it uses, it'll pick the right one during configuration.

The better question is why are you using XenServer? About the only reason I can think of is you got a free set of licenses from some where.

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