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EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003



evol262 posted:

300k for what? Whether or not it's reasonable depends on what kind of speed your old coworker needs, dedup or not, interface, capacity, and fault tolerance.

I can't comment one what he is getting for that, but video editing is the one area of storage that has demands for large amounts of space and large sustained throughput. This combination is one that doesn't benefit from the usual tricks of cache and memory. You need spindles and bandwidth, both of which are expensive.

When we did our SAN, I explicitly told both the company owners that if they expanded the video side they were toying with, it was a whole separate discussion, because there was no way to 'build in' and future support for video without enormous (wasted) upfront costs.

Ask a storage consultant about video, and their eyes will light up $_$.

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Muslim Wookie
Jul 6, 2005

EoRaptor posted:

I can't comment one what he is getting for that, but video editing is the one area of storage that has demands for large amounts of space and large sustained throughput. This combination is one that doesn't benefit from the usual tricks of cache and memory. You need spindles and bandwidth, both of which are expensive.

When we did our SAN, I explicitly told both the company owners that if they expanded the video side they were toying with, it was a whole separate discussion, because there was no way to 'build in' and future support for video without enormous (wasted) upfront costs.

Ask a storage consultant about video, and their eyes will light up $_$.

That's not true... get a NetApp system with one shelf to start with and scale out as more space is required and scale up as the low end $10k controller you're running runs out of grunt.

When people say "a lot" I can pretty confidently say not very much at all, since if they can't tell me their requirements in IOPs then I know they aren't a big player. Seriously, just NetApp that poo poo...

As to EMC, man I dunno, I just don't get why people even bother with them. I hope I never have to work with their systems again.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

StabbinHobo posted:

hey everybody

an old coworker buddy of mine is at a new startup where they intend to produce "a lot" of video. They brought in a storage consultant who quoted 300k and he's balking. I told him its probably at least close to reasonable, but I'd look around for a second-opinion consultant. Anybody know anyone good in the NYC area?

As already said above - more info needed.

I don't know a consultant but as for platforms to look at - Look into Isilon, spent the day racking one and setting up to see how it worked. loving fastastic and used by practically everyone in the media space.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

bort posted:


Not sure I agree with 3, though, Vanilla. They can discount anything and have the option to charge me less or nothing for maintenance. As for claiming the revenue, typically they can claim the revenue from a contract based on the percentage complete it is. If you sign a three year contract, you can certainly expect them to claim 33% of the revenue in year 3.

They can do things to hide the maintenance but in the background it's always coming off their bottom line. This is typical with big accounts but not 95% of the business. For them maintenance stays set.

I think you're right about the maintnenace revenue thing come to thin kabout it.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

I've been dealing with 2 EMC resellers for my new storage and I swear one of them just didn't read the tender. The other one's completely fine. IDGI, do you not like money?

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

evil_bunnY posted:

I've been dealing with 2 EMC resellers for my new storage and I swear one of them just didn't read the tender. The other one's completely fine. IDGI, do you not like money?
Only one of them is going to get the preferred pricing from EMC, you will never get competitive quotes from different sales vendors on a single manufacturer of gear.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

adorai posted:

Only one of them is going to get the preferred pricing from EMC, you will never get competitive quotes from different sales vendors on a single manufacturer of gear.

There is no preferred pricing when tenders are involved. The preferred pricing is given to the reseller who registers a non-tender deal first so that the finder has an advantage.

Wompa164
Jul 19, 2001

Don't write ghouls.
Does anyone know of a free or low-cost Windows-based tool (preferably <=$100) for backing up (spanning) volumes to tape? I don't need scheduling or restore functionality, just something reliable and widely supported for making one-time backups. Incremental backup functionality is a plus as well. My research on backup software has come up with stuff like CommVault, BackupExec, etc. which are all way outside of my price range as a home user.

I know Microsoft no longer supports backing up to tape in Windows Server 2008, would it be worth installing Windows Server 2003 simply to use NTBackup to accomplish this? How robust/reliable is the tape backup functionality in older versions of Windows server?

Less Fat Luke
May 23, 2003

Exciting Lemon
So the production databases where I work are heavily IO bound (pretty normal I guess). We currently have a bunch of Sun Storagetek disk arrays for them. Dual controllers, battery backed, 1 gig of cache, and so on. They use standard enterprise SAS disks and have decent performance. However, since Oracle bought them the price on staying with that line/technology is pretty loving huge. We're considering moving to Dell MD3* arrays, as we have a bunch of those as well and they're no bullshit and fairly solid.

What I would rather do though is move us completely to SSD storage. We currently have database sizes under 1TB in each of the servers. I was thinking of buying a pair of these for each host:

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227724

And mirroring them. Yes, I know, gently caress OCZ, etc. I'm going to look at PCIe based drives from other vendors as well, but for that price 1.2TB of usable storage is pretty awesome.

So my question is - are there any flash-based disk arrays out there for non-Enterprise customers? I priced out some of the Dell MD arrays with SSDs, but they literally want 3500$ for each 150GB drive.

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



I like the fact that HP has made it as painful as possible to try to download new software for LeftHand, outside of using the Java management crap. Unfortunately the GUI won't download updates for whatever reason and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out with WireShark what FTP server and port it's trying to fetch from so I can open the firewall for it (since it's running on the vSphere machine which has a buttload of network cards, so about 10 loaded interfaces to try...)

Anyone know where I should start looking to get downloads to work? My liver doesn't like this problem.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Attach shark to the nic in the VM?

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



CMC isn't running in a VM, it's running on a physical machine that also runs the vSphere server.

Or do you mean the LeftHand FOM VM? Is that the one doing the downloading and not the CMC app itself? Which seems weird, since CMC downloads to a local folder (and FTP seems to be working so I have no idea why this piece of poo poo software isn't working)

Edit: Figured out a way to run tcpdump on it. It's contacting ftp.usa.hp.com, but over HTTPS. And then failing. Guess I'm going to have a field day with my HP contractor tomorrow.

luminalflux fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Nov 30, 2011

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

luminalflux posted:

CMC isn't running in a VM, it's running on a physical machine that also runs the vSphere server.
I'm extremely confused and trying to guess what you mean when you say "vSphere server" isn't getting me anywhere. :psyduck:

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



Sorry about that, I was extremely tired and frustrated. By "the vCenter server" I meant the windows server that VMware vSphere is running on (the product that makes ESXi actually useful, handling vMotion et c). We use that machine's console via RDP as our primary management interface, and run CMC on it since we don't have VPN connections to the SAN machines.

Apparently the problem was that someone configured the download URL to use HTTPS, which wasn't working for some reason (even though I could navigate to it in explorer). When we found the preferences file and commented it out the line with the URL the upgrades started working.

Then again, it's going a lot slower downloading in the client than if I download with Explorer. gently caress this poo poo.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
If you'd said vCenter, misogynist probably wouldn't have been confused. vCenter is a specific application, vSphere could mean any random part of this.

Terminology is important when discussing VMware's offerings, because everything sounds roughly the same. God help you if you get into the acronyms; I opened a trouble ticket about the vCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and VMware's own support staff did not know what I was talking about. They use different acronyms internally.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

Mierdaan posted:

If you'd said vCenter, misogynist probably wouldn't have been confused. vCenter is a specific application, vSphere could mean any random part of this.
Based on the Windows bit, 100% of my effort went into trying to determine if he was even talking about vSphere at all or if he had confused it with Hyper-V.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Misogynist posted:

Based on the Windows bit, 100% of my effort went into trying to determine if he was even talking about vSphere at all or if he had confused it with Hyper-V.
It could have been an old vmware server install too!

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



Sorry, I tend to mix those up. All these v-Names... Even better, the LeftHand FOM runs in a standalone VMware Server on the same machine as vCenter.

Anyway I got my patches downloaded finally, mostly by manually downloaded via Right Click Save As in my browser. What a wonderful piece of software that complicates the simple task of "downloading a bunch of files"

j3rkstore
Jan 28, 2009

L'esprit d'escalier
I work for a small company and we're about to move forward with a NetApp 2040 filer. This is our first forray into consolidated storage and I'm looking forward to clustering and virtualization.

Is it going to be as awsome as I think and hope it will be? :ohdear:

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Nothing wrong with Netapp but the price really, from what I've seen so far. What kind of software features did you grab?

madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari

evil_bunnY posted:

Nothing wrong with Netapp but the price really, from what I've seen so far. What kind of software features did you grab?

The new 2040 pricing is very low, and is probably the lowest quote you'll get from any enterprise SAN vendor. EMC really doesn't compete in that space that often (~$10-20k).

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
yeah an entry level iscsi only 2040 would be great to start with for a small business.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

adorai posted:

yeah an entry level iscsi only 2040 would be great to start with for a small business.
Well then all is well. I tend to like the Netapp stuff I've worked with (certainly more tolerable than the average EMC management tool).

j3rkstore
Jan 28, 2009

L'esprit d'escalier
Yeah we were pretty surprised when we requested an updated quote and learned that the 2020 we were looking at was recently phased out. The 2040 dropped to 2020-level of pricing so its a pretty big unexpected bonus.

We're getting the "complete" pack, as we look forward to the SQL snap manager capabilities, anticipate moving towards vmware, and ideally will be adding another geographically distinct unit for replication next year.

Another reason we were looking at the complete pack was the different protocols we needed to use (we still have production Alpha servers) but apparently the 2040 now includes all of the protocols rather than you having to buy them individually.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

j3rkstore posted:

We're getting the "complete" pack, as we look forward to the SQL snap manager capabilities, anticipate moving towards vmware, and ideally will be adding another geographically distinct unit for replication next year.
We have the complete pack on our primary HA pair. The snapmanager suite is really nice, specifically snapmanager for SQL. We don't do many restores, but knowing that our backups were completed and dbcc checked every night in just a few minutes is great, as well as the ease of setting up a test environment.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

What's the general opinion of 3PAR kit?

I'm not the SAN guy, but we're looking at replacing our 2 NetApp 3020's with a single larger unit and hopefully saving on maintenance costs. I think the 3020's are going into year 4 of production and they're maxed out shelf wise. My boss has mentioned the maintenance renewal on these is borderline robbery.

According to my VAR HP is being ultra aggressive with 3PAR right now, especially when unseating the incumbent SAN in a company and really wants to get them in front of the SAN guy and our boss, but I'm hesitant to recommend they talk to them without doing some homework.

Right now we're in talks with NetApp for a larger unit...I'm assuming something along the lines of a 6040 unit.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

madsushi posted:

The new 2040 pricing is very low, and is probably the lowest quote you'll get from any enterprise SAN vendor. EMC really doesn't compete in that space that often (~$10-20k).

Naaaaaa bro, the VNXe has been in that space for aaages.

Starts at 10k

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/01/vnxe-incredible-things-in-tiny-transformer-like-packages.html

Serfer
Mar 10, 2003

The piss tape is real



Vanilla posted:

Naaaaaa bro, the VNXe has been in that space for aaages.

Starts at 10k

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/01/vnxe-incredible-things-in-tiny-transformer-like-packages.html
I can go on about this for quite a length, but I would highly advise never buying EMC equipment. I'm certainly not doing that ever again. Compellent equipment already on order.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Vanilla posted:

Naaaaaa bro, the VNXe has been in that space for aaages.

Starts at 10k

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/01/vnxe-incredible-things-in-tiny-transformer-like-packages.html

Why is no one mentioning Dell? :ohdear:

When we went for shared storage my boss went with a Dell MD3200. Is there a reason no one seems to be touching these (in these forums) for smb storage solutions?

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

skipdogg posted:

What's the general opinion of 3PAR kit?

I'm not the SAN guy, but we're looking at replacing our 2 NetApp 3020's with a single larger unit and hopefully saving on maintenance costs. I think the 3020's are going into year 4 of production and they're maxed out shelf wise. My boss has mentioned the maintenance renewal on these is borderline robbery.

According to my VAR HP is being ultra aggressive with 3PAR right now, especially when unseating the incumbent SAN in a company and really wants to get them in front of the SAN guy and our boss, but I'm hesitant to recommend they talk to them without doing some homework.

Right now we're in talks with NetApp for a larger unit...I'm assuming something along the lines of a 6040 unit.

3PAR arrays are pretty good. They always come top in the 'would buy again' rankings.

It has good features which Netapp does not (multiple heads, data movement) and a lack few features that your Netapp arrays do have (dedup, integrated file, etc).

I read in the register recently that Netapp were giving away a load of PAM cards with each 6xxx unit, worth checking into.

To be honest I have found that HP are NOT aggressive with pricing, the 3PAR arrays have been priced up there with the tier 1 VMAX and HDS arrays. They are bringhing out an agressive pricing pack but this is for the lower end model, not the higher end model you would likely need if you're looking at arrays as big as a FAS6xxxx.

Things to be aware of - 3PAR are behind the curve a bit on VMware integration and features. They still have a very small footprint in the industry (had 0.5% of storag e market share when HP bought them), it's a capacity licensed array, it's yellow, no Qos, no dedup, commercial grade SSD drives and no PAM cards or extended cache capability.

Few down sides but by all means is a pretty good array. I think pricing will shock you personally. Just invite all the vendors (especially Dell) and watch the prices drop. Some vendors even will do a buy back on your old kit (often quite a bit of $$ and saves you disposal costs).

Nebulis01
Dec 30, 2003
Technical Support Ninny

Moey posted:

Why is no one mentioning Dell? :ohdear:

When we went for shared storage my boss went with a Dell MD3200. Is there a reason no one seems to be touching these (in these forums) for smb storage solutions?

I have two MD3000i and a 1220 and like them. We also have two EqualLogic PS4000X (one purchased in dec 2010 for $29,999.99 inc tax. One purchased in March 2011 for $27,800.00 inc tax )

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Moey posted:

Why is no one mentioning Dell? :ohdear:
They're great when you don't need buckets of performance or superfancy features.
Also, cheap (well, SAN cheap) SSD tiers.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





On the low end, I can't recommend Equallogic enough. I wish these negative EMC comments had come out a few months ago. I am stuck with two VNX 5300s that are frustrating the hell out of me.

Slappy Pappy
Oct 15, 2003

Mighty, mighty eagle soaring free
Defender of our homes and liberty
Bravery, humility, and honesty...
Mighty, mighty eagle, rescue me!
Dinosaur Gum

Serfer posted:

I can go on about this for quite a length, but I would highly advise never buying EMC equipment. I'm certainly not doing that ever again. Compellent equipment already on order.

Why don't you? If your company is OK with running its infrastructure on whitebox equipment and a heavy software layer then I agree - it's pretty awesome what Compellent has done. Personally, I would only consider them for 2nd tier storage. EMC is a giant pain in the rear end to deal with but in this job market I know I will never lose my job because I selected EMC. They work well. They're reliable as hell and they have a great reputation among the fringe IT crowd (aka, my CTO). If my EMC SAN went down the first thing my CTO would do is call our EMC rep and chew him a new rear end in a top hat. If I had a Compellent SAN as primary storage and it went down, the first thing my CTO would do is say "what the hell is Compellent and who's dumb idea was it to run our infrastructure on it? Fire Spamtron."

It's an exaggeration to show a point. The job market is tough right now. Nobody will second-guess your decision to implement a VNX or Symmetrix. Redundancy is job 1 with EMC. If I was starting from scratch today I would probably go with 3PAR because of how it scales. But since I've got 7 years running EMC Clariions and VMAX without a single second of downtime or performance issues I'm inclined to stay with EMC - the risk of doing anything else is too large.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Spamtron7000 posted:

Why don't you? If your company is OK with running its infrastructure on whitebox equipment and a heavy software layer then I agree - it's pretty awesome what Compellent has done. Personally, I would only consider them for 2nd tier storage. EMC is a giant pain in the rear end to deal with but in this job market I know I will never lose my job because I selected EMC. They work well. They're reliable as hell and they have a great reputation among the fringe IT crowd (aka, my CTO). If my EMC SAN went down the first thing my CTO would do is call our EMC rep and chew him a new rear end in a top hat. If I had a Compellent SAN as primary storage and it went down, the first thing my CTO would do is say "what the hell is Compellent and who's dumb idea was it to run our infrastructure on it? Fire Spamtron."
So you should buy whatever your disfunctional CTO thinks is great!

Serfer posted:

:catstare:
Jesus H Christ.

evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Dec 2, 2011

Serfer
Mar 10, 2003

The piss tape is real



Spamtron7000 posted:

Why don't you? If your company is OK with running its infrastructure on whitebox equipment and a heavy software layer then I agree - it's pretty awesome what Compellent has done. Personally, I would only consider them for 2nd tier storage. EMC is a giant pain in the rear end to deal with but in this job market I know I will never lose my job because I selected EMC. They work well. They're reliable as hell and they have a great reputation among the fringe IT crowd (aka, my CTO). If my EMC SAN went down the first thing my CTO would do is call our EMC rep and chew him a new rear end in a top hat. If I had a Compellent SAN as primary storage and it went down, the first thing my CTO would do is say "what the hell is Compellent and who's dumb idea was it to run our infrastructure on it? Fire Spamtron."

It's an exaggeration to show a point. The job market is tough right now. Nobody will second-guess your decision to implement a VNX or Symmetrix. Redundancy is job 1 with EMC. If I was starting from scratch today I would probably go with 3PAR because of how it scales. But since I've got 7 years running EMC Clariions and VMAX without a single second of downtime or performance issues I'm inclined to stay with EMC - the risk of doing anything else is too large.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"

Compellent is pretty big, and it's owned by Dell now. It's also not "white box" equipment, you're just showing that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's like saying EMC Avamar is a white box just because it's just a Dell 2950.

EMC support is so horrible it's better to consult the homeless dude begging for change outside of the McDonalds rather than call them. In the past two weeks I've had one SAN go down twice, each time for over 24 hours. EMC's solution is to have a conference call and tell me that not only is it likely to happen again, but the way I should fix it is by buying brand new EMC equipment. Their sales guy had the balls to call me in the middle of the second downtime and congratulate himself for the timing of the new quotes he had made. Their west coast support lead told me that it's likely to happen again, and that simply put, the drives they overcharge us for are worthless and are known problems. They claim that they design for reliability and stability but get a bad sector? Kernel panic, corrupt the filesystem, extended downtime. Not only is this completely unacceptable, they act like it's expected, and not a big deal. Oh yeah, just delete the array, recreate it, rebind the LUN, restore everything from backup. This is not what we purchased a SAN for, this isn't what we pay support contracts for, and isn't sane.

After speaking with a friend who also runs EMC equipment, and having him say that he's had almost the exact same issue on vMax equipment, there's no way I could recommend it.

Additionally, EMC believes that we should replace all our equipment every three years, which is insanity. We can't spend $100,000 every three years, and have to do complete forklift upgrades because they came out with a new model and jacked up support rates to an insane degree. This has hit us twice, and we're not stupid enough to go back for more. Compellent has offered a clearer upgrade path, offers forwards compatibility, and with Dell behind it, I don't see this changing anytime in the future. Additionally, since Dell split with EMC, they are offering steep discounts on replacing EMC equipment, which makes them no longer have the huge price premium over other vendors.

PS, I've literally had to type things for support people because they have no idea where any of the utilities are, how they are used, or even what piece of equipment they should be accessing. They've not known how to open a command prompt, they've referred me to KB articles that simply tell me to escalate the issue to a higher level, and then when I ask to escalate it, they ask if I've followed the KB first. Yeah, I don't know what Dell's Compellent support is like yet, but I'm willing to risk it rather than deal with EMC support again.

KS
Jun 10, 2003
Outrageous Lumpwad

Serfer posted:

I don't know what Dell's Compellent support is like yet, but I'm willing to risk it rather than deal with EMC support again.

Copilot is the best support I have ever had to deal with and Dell has not hosed it up (yet?).

Slappy Pappy
Oct 15, 2003

Mighty, mighty eagle soaring free
Defender of our homes and liberty
Bravery, humility, and honesty...
Mighty, mighty eagle, rescue me!
Dinosaur Gum
Sorry - the point of my post wasn't to bash Compellent but if you think Compellent has the same level of redundancy and reliability EMC has, you're kidding yourself. Dealing with EMC is a pain in the rear end but I've had good luck with their support. Their PM's make me want to stab myself in the face and their software is notoriously clunky but I'm still happy with them as my primary storage vendor. I'm glad I haven't had the same experience as you - that's what I was getting at. If I ever do, I'm sure I'd feel the same way.

Serfer
Mar 10, 2003

The piss tape is real



Spamtron7000 posted:

Sorry - the point of my post wasn't to bash Compellent but if you think Compellent has the same level of redundancy and reliability EMC has, you're kidding yourself. Dealing with EMC is a pain in the rear end but I've had good luck with their support. Their PM's make me want to stab myself in the face and their software is notoriously clunky but I'm still happy with them as my primary storage vendor. I'm glad I haven't had the same experience as you - that's what I was getting at. If I ever do, I'm sure I'd feel the same way.
Dual pathing, dual redundant controllers, dual power supplies everywhere, battery backup on the controller, I'm not sure what kind of redundancy you're implying doesn't exist outside of EMC. Netapp, 3Par, even tiny little Pogo has those.

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three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

Serfer posted:

Compellent is pretty big, and it's owned by Dell now. It's also not "white box" equipment, you're just showing that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's like saying EMC Avamar is a white box just because it's just a Dell 2950.
Technically, Compellent controllers are built using SuperMicro hardware (for now).

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