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Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011

Caged posted:

Oh god I can tell I'm going to get horrifically abused about this, but I'll ask the question anyway. We are looking to move to 'proper' storage for our VMs and files - from what I've been reading it seems that NFS is the way to go for VMware, and CIFS for your files stuff, combined nicely with things like snapshots so users can use the Previous Versions frontend in Windows to recover recently-deleted stuff. All sounds good. However, our budget is comparatively tiny. I need roughly 6TB for VM, and the same again for files.

We've been talking with a vendor who wants us to have an IBM V7000, I had a demo and it looks awesome, but I think it's going to come in close to £20k (UK) which is about double what I've actually got to play with. Dell are keen to sell us a MD3220i, and from doing a bit of research the HP P2000 G3 plays in that sort of space as well. Has anyone used either of these with any success?

Am I lining myself up for failure to try and do this for ~£10k and is now the time to start working on getting that budget increased?

I'd look at straight iSCSI, Equallogic or P4000 give all the bells and whistles for one price.

The thing to watch with anything from the big boys is licensing - if you're not careful they'll bend you over for pretty much anything/everything.

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Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

I'd at least take a look at EMC's VNXe line, it could easily be within reach of your price range depending on how you spec it out. I only got to use one in a lab environment at my last job but it was pretty slick for an entry level system. It does both NFS and iSCSI out of the box. Just keep in mind that for better or worse, it's designed for the admin that doesn't know or want to know about storage in great detail. So for a lot of settings it's just EMC's way or the highway.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

I've priced both VNXe and Eqaullogic systems very similar to his requirements and both came in around 35K US

He's not getting close for the equivalent of 16K USD.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





The MSRP on a PS4100E with enough raw space to get 6TB usable is around 19k USD or so. And that is the MSRP. If you tell them you are also shopping a VNXe you'll get a discount. And vice versa.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Yeah there's no way 6TB on a equal4k is $35K US.

Nebulis01
Dec 30, 2003
Technical Support Ninny

evil_bunnY posted:

Yeah there's no way 6TB on a equal4k is $35K US.

Our PS4000X was $29,999 (450GB 10K Drives, 3yrs 24/7/365 2hr support)

I should note we bought that in the 2nd half of 2011. The first one purchased in 2010 was $35k I think.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

He wants 6TB usable for VM (fast disk I'm assuming) and 6TB usable for files. I'm assuming 2 shelves and whatnot since you usually can't mix and match.

I got quotes for 9TB fast and 12TB 7.2K raw which isn't far from what he wants and I was around the 35K mark with 3 years support/warranty. Knock off some for fewer drives than my quotes, but it won't make that big of a difference.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





skipdogg posted:

He wants 6TB usable for VM (fast disk I'm assuming) and 6TB usable for files. I'm assuming 2 shelves and whatnot since you usually can't mix and match.

I got quotes for 9TB fast and 12TB 7.2K raw which isn't far from what he wants and I was around the 35K mark with 3 years support/warranty. Knock off some for fewer drives than my quotes, but it won't make that big of a difference.

Oh, I missed that part. I can't imagine having 6TB worth of VMs and only having 16k USD to work with. On the Equallogic side you actually can get boxes that have a mix of storage. Same with EMC. Should be the same with NetApp.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole

Internet Explorer posted:

Oh, I missed that part. I can't imagine having 6TB worth of VMs and only having 16k USD to work with. On the Equallogic side you actually can get boxes that have a mix of storage. Same with EMC. Should be the same with NetApp.

Equallogic doesn't offer mixed SATA/SAS in the same unit, afaik; only mix of SAS and SSD.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Don't upgrade a box 5300 from 5.31 to 5.32. EMC may have to replace all of our sps and control stations...

UGH.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Goon Matchmaker posted:

Don't upgrade a box 5300 from 5.31 to 5.32. EMC may have to replace all of our sps and control stations...

UGH.

We upgraded 2 VNX 5300 units from 5.31 to 5.32. On both units there was a hiccup where the File side thought the Block side had not been upgraded, but once we got that sorted things seem to be fine.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Helpful Posters posted:

Useful stuff

Thanks, I had a pretty good idea that it wasn't going to happen for that budget but I'm no expert on this stuff. I'll advise that these guys either find more money or change their requirements.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Internet Explorer posted:

We upgraded 2 VNX 5300 units from 5.31 to 5.32. On both units there was a hiccup where the File side thought the Block side had not been upgraded, but once we got that sorted things seem to be fine.

These kinds of issues are why I'm skeptical of "Unified" appliances that are really just a block filesystem with a separate NAS hung in front of it. With storage being as complicated as it is these days it's tough to make sure you've got one stable codeline that you keep up to date, never mind two separate ones that are expected to interact in various ways.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
:sigh: Still in the datacenter. Tier 2 support has been working the problem along with the field tech now since about 10:30 this morning. Engineering has also been pulled in. To say the upgrade went horribly wrong is an understatement. They're also not entirely sure the upgrade caused it.

I just want to go home...

Edit: If I understood the field tech, we've been escalated to second tier us engineering support.

Apparently I hosed things up real good.

Goon Matchmaker fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Jul 31, 2012

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

three posted:

Equallogic doesn't offer mixed SATA/SAS in the same unit, afaik; only mix of SAS and SSD.
Equallogic doesn't offer SATA at all, even their 7k drives are SAS.

In other news I called Netapp for the first time this afternoon and talked to a pleasant chap who seemed pretty knowledgeable for a phone monkey. They're getting back to me tomorrow.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

NippleFloss posted:

These kinds of issues are why I'm skeptical of "Unified" appliances that are really just a block filesystem with a separate NAS hung in front of it. With storage being as complicated as it is these days it's tough to make sure you've got one stable codeline that you keep up to date, never mind two separate ones that are expected to interact in various ways.
I'd be way more wary of things that violate that orthogonal separation between components that have nothing to do with each other. That's how you end up with weird poo poo like MPFS.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Misogynist posted:

I'd be way more wary of things that violate that orthogonal separation between components that have nothing to do with each other. That's how you end up with weird poo poo like MPFS.

I would say that a "unified" appliance that is really two separate appliances that are packaged together in such a way that a fault with either can break one or both does exactly that. SAN and NAS aren't orthogonal unless you feel that accessing an object via a filehandle and a block offset is so wildly different than accessing an object by a logical unit number and block offset that you cannot imagine a world in which the two can peacefully coexist.

I think there are definite QA advantages to a true unified approach where all protocols are basically just a different software interfaces to the same data retrieval and storage mechanisms, all running under the same OS. Everything is vulnerable to bad coding but I feel my chances are better when I only have to trust one team of programmers writing one OS to get it mostly right.

If having two separate devices was really a net win the marketing departments for EMC and IBM would be shouting it from the rooftops, but their pitches mostly focus around unified block/file and tend to gloss over the detail in favor of the "one appliance that does everything!" spiel. Probably because "two appliances that do different things, but one of them talks to the other and uses it to do stuff too, and they are loosely coupled and in the same rack!" is a less appealing marketing blurb. By that definition my IBM FastT with LUNs on a windows file server that I managed years ago was a Unified SAN/NAS architecture.

I imagine this is akin to religious debate and which side you fall on depends largely on where your allegiances lie, but those were my thoughts before I was on the NetApp payroll and they're pretty much the same now.

YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Jul 31, 2012

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

evil_bunnY posted:

Equallogic doesn't offer SATA at all, even their 7k drives are SAS.


I personally replaced several SATA drives in my PS6510E; all my 48 drives are the same 2TB 7200RPM SATA-II Seagate Constellation, like this one here: http://compare.ebay.com/like/261063571150?var=lv&ltyp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Nukelear v.2 posted:

Just as a follow-up on this, the host I was testing from did not have it's nics set for jumbo frames. Changing the MTU to 9000 resolved the issue, not exactly sure why this would have happened though, should have just been performance degradation as far as I understand things. It's now happily pushing close to 33,000 IO/s at 255MB/s on my 8k random workload.

Edit: Personally I think broadcom drivers are wrong when they label the default MTU at 1500 and they really sending 9216. Since EQL says they can only support 9000 even on 10G. That makes more sense to me as the cause.

Do a search in my posts about Broadcom and you will see why all their drivers are utter PoS.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Misogynist posted:

They're useful as giant scratch storage, but my personal recommendation is to never store anything important on DDN.

I used to run our entire production load on a single S2A9550, there's nothing wrong with them, I think. It's just that it's a big, dumb RAID storage piece, there some options - strictly console-only mgmt - but basically it was a giant fast array (~20TB) and that's it. No features, not even snapshots, nothing.

szlevi fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jul 31, 2012

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

szlevi posted:

I personally replaced several SATA drives in my PS6510E; all my 48 drives are the same 2TB 7200RPM SATA-II Seagate Constellation, like this one here: http://compare.ebay.com/like/261063571150?var=lv&ltyp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar
Hahaha you've got the one model I didn't know did that. It's only the lower capacity drives, but still (3TB are NL-SAS).

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Finally got back on the phone with EMC support this morning around 10:30. They've got engineering looking into it and doing things in the lab. There's no plan of attack on how to fix it, nor an ETA when things will be restored. We've been in a degraded state since last week due to this and are no closer to a resolution. It's amazing. My boss has authorized me to make the call to just box the thing up and ship it back and get a NetApp if they don't get their act together and get it straightened out.

So far I'm not impressed with EMC support, though that's a bit of an understatement.

Goon Matchmaker fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jul 31, 2012

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Goon Matchmaker posted:

Finally got back on the phone with EMC support this morning around 10:30. They've got engineering looking into it and doing things in the lab. There's no plan of attack on how to fix it, nor an ETA when things will be restored. We've been in a degraded state since last week due to this and are no closer to a resolution. It's amazing. My boss has authorized me to make the call to just box the thing up and ship it back and get a NetApp if they don't get their act together and get it straightened out.

So far I'm not terribly impressed with EMC support, though that's a bit of an understatement.

We have been having the same conversation in my office, although we'd probably go back to an Equallogic SAN as we're familiar with them and we've have wasted so much time migrating already. I think we'll probably limp along until it is time to replace these SANs, but it kind of sucks going from "Man, these things will be AWESOME!" to "Holy poo poo, these things are awful."

And yeah, EMC's support, at least for the VNX line, is loving abysmal.

I just got off the phone with them a few hours ago. If you'll recall we had the issue with the File and Block side were not communicating properly. The 7.1 / 5.32 updates fixed the problem, but one of the issues we were having is that we expanded a File System, it puked out a bunch of errors and then it instantly ate all the storage we gave it. Support's idea was to upgrade to 7.1 / 5.32 and the space would appear.

Not that case. Support's next idea was "well, users have access to that space so they could have used it or the File System could have used it as overhead." I calculated the space files were using and it looked fine, and there was no way several hundred gigs just disappeared to "overhead." Support said the problem was on our end and that was that.

After hanging up the phone with him I extended the File System again, to see what would happen. The "lost" free space and the extra free space I added appeared just fine. Problem solved.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


It appears that one of my Lefthand storage nodes has sprung a memory leak! Now I need to reboot the node in the middle of the work day :stare:

The_Groove
Mar 15, 2003

Supersonic compressible convection in the sun

szlevi posted:

I used to run our entire production load on a single 8550, there's nothing wrong with them, I think. It's just a big, dumb RAID storage piece, there some options - strictly console-only mgmt - but basically it was a giant fast array (~20TB) and that's it. No features, not even snapshots, nothing.
I love the console-based management personally, so much quicker than loading up some java GUI or whatever, plus you can do stuff from your phone if you really have to. With my DDN9550 and 9900 gear the filesystem (GPFS) had all the features for snapshots, resizing filesystems, etc., so a big, dumb, storage system was perfect.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
We're up to two field techs on site, a level 2 support guy and two engineers on a webex.

How the gently caress did the VNX line get past QA with problems like this.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Number19 posted:

It appears that one of my Lefthand storage nodes has sprung a memory leak! Now I need to reboot the node in the middle of the work day :stare:

Oh hey look it all worked like it's supposed to and not like the other times where the nodes refused to fail over and everything went offline.

It's my lucky day.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

netapp bug report posted:

NetApp recommends that customers discontinue using OnCommand System Manager immediately to:
- Edit vFiler configurations
- Use the CIFS Setup Wizard for reconfiguring CIFS
Enterprise grade management tools, ladies and gents.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

evil_bunnY posted:

Enterprise grade management tools, ladies and gents.
Don't use system manager to do anything, ever, and you'll be happier for it. This is just one in a string of stupid bugs starting with 2.0 that almost all revolve around it occasionally just trashing config files.

CLI is the only proper way to manage a filer.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





NippleFloss posted:



CLI is the only proper way to manage a filer.

And this is why Equallogic is destroying EMC and NetApp in the SMB market. Not everyone has someone on staff who can babysit the SAN day in and day out. Although I did want to ask you for more details on the Unified NetApp approach. But it is late and I am posting from my phone.

Noghri_ViR
Oct 19, 2001

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

NippleFloss posted:

Don't use system manager to do anything, ever, and you'll be happier for it. This is just one in a string of stupid bugs starting with 2.0 that almost all revolve around it occasionally just trashing config files.

CLI is the only proper way to manage a filer.
it's the year 2012. I should be able to click to do what I want. My grandfather used a computer with a CLI....I could go on

ghostinmyshell
Sep 17, 2004



I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.
Hey where did the other guy with a Starboard go? I want to hear how he's doing and if he's applied the new update yet?

:ssh: We haven't.

Nomex
Jul 17, 2002

Flame retarded.

NippleFloss posted:

Don't use system manager to do anything, ever, and you'll be happier for it. This is just one in a string of stupid bugs starting with 2.0 that almost all revolve around it occasionally just trashing config files.

CLI is the only proper way to manage a filer.

Stop lying, 2.0 could cause unprompted data loss without trashing the configs ;)

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003



Internet Explorer posted:

And this is why Equallogic is destroying EMC and NetApp in the SMB market. Not everyone has someone on staff who can babysit the SAN day in and day out. Although I did want to ask you for more details on the Unified NetApp approach. But it is late and I am posting from my phone.

I like Equallogic, but the recent firmware change that prevents LUN deletion without a support call for authorization is a bit too dumb.

complex
Sep 16, 2003

EoRaptor posted:

I like Equallogic, but the recent firmware change that prevents LUN deletion without a support call for authorization is a bit too dumb.

This just sounds so ridiculous I can't believe it. Is this true?

ozmunkeh
Feb 28, 2008

hey guys what is happening in this thread

Number19 posted:

Oh hey look it all worked like it's supposed to and not like the other times where the nodes refused to fail over and everything went offline.

It's my lucky day.
The only thing (the only thing) I miss from the old Lefthand gear is being able to reboot a controller without having an outage, however minor that outage may be. EQL has a few seconds of "hooly poo poo what's happening?" while the passive controller comes online.

Internet Explorer posted:

And this is why Equallogic is destroying EMC and NetApp in the SMB market. Not everyone has someone on staff who can babysit the SAN day in and day out.
Well, that and $$$. We finally got a NetApp quote on the day we installed the Equallogic and it was more than double what we paid for EQL for around half the capacity. We could have brought it down to a comparable price by opting for a single controller, something the VAR recommended..

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





EoRaptor posted:

I like Equallogic, but the recent firmware change that prevents LUN deletion without a support call for authorization is a bit too dumb.

Wow. Really? I'll have to check the latest release notes. Do you know what version introduced this? I've stopped following Equallogic releases now that all my time is spent wrangling our VNX.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Noghri_ViR posted:

it's the year 2012. I should be able to click to do what I want. My grandfather used a computer with a CLI....I could go on

I didn't say it was right, I just said it was true. System Manager does not have the same level of functionality or the same level of assurance as the CLI does. It will eventually get there, but it's not there yet.


Internet Explorer posted:

And this is why Equallogic is destroying EMC and NetApp in the SMB market. Not everyone has someone on staff who can babysit the SAN day in and day out. Although I did want to ask you for more details on the Unified NetApp approach. But it is late and I am posting from my phone.

I mean, they just started offering 0% financing on EQL storage. That's the same poo poo that Hyundai does when they want to get rid of last year's Accent's. That's not something you do when you're crushing the competition. Equallogic does pretty well in some segments because they sell at a discount relative to the fuller featured boxes from NetApp and EMC and because they have a good product. They're hardly crushing anyone in any markets. They only own 30% of the iSCSI-only market, with EMC at 20%.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wo...-idc-2012-06-08

Dell doesn't even get named, it just makes it into "Others" in External Disk systems market share, and that includes EQL, Compellant and PowerVault. They were at something like 7% market share middle of last year. And they're probably around the same now. EMC is crushing everyone in the storage market. They have nearly a third of the total market now, and they have been increasing market share year over year. Consider that the next time you want to make a "quality = market share" argument.


Nomex posted:

Stop lying, 2.0 could cause unprompted data loss without trashing the configs ;)

Well, technically it *WAS* prompted, the prompt just implied that System Manager would, you know, properly check that a volume was REALLY empty before deleting it.

The good news is they've had a bug for basically every major configuration file now so there aren't really any left to break, unless they have regressions.


ozmunkeh posted:

Well, that and $$$. We finally got a NetApp quote on the day we installed the Equallogic and it was more than double what we paid for EQL for around half the capacity. We could have brought it down to a comparable price by opting for a single controller, something the VAR recommended..

Don't ever let a VAR talk you into buy a single controller NetApp for anything other than scratch storage or backups. Production storage should be fault tolerant and a single controller has a myriad of ways it can fail. If that's the only way to get NetApp price competitive then you should just go with the competitor or look for a NetApp VAR who will try to work with you without crippling the device.

ozmunkeh
Feb 28, 2008

hey guys what is happening in this thread

Internet Explorer posted:

Wow. Really? I'll have to check the latest release notes. Do you know what version introduced this? I've stopped following Equallogic releases now that all my time is spent wrangling our VNX.

Maybe it's in the 6.0.0 beta release? I can't see anything in the 5.x release notes.

NippleFloss posted:

Don't ever let a VAR talk you into buy a single controller NetApp for anything other than scratch storage or backups. Production storage should be fault tolerant and a single controller has a myriad of ways it can fail. If that's the only way to get NetApp price competitive then you should just go with the competitor or look for a NetApp VAR who will try to work with you without crippling the device.

Oh, agreed. We had already written off NetApp mostly because both NetApp VARs we spoke with were fantastically shady - like Devious Dave's used car lot "We Finance" levels of shady. No thanks. The eventual quote (that was 2 months in the making), with tax, was a few dollars under $60K for 12x2TB SATA disks.

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YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

ozmunkeh posted:

Oh, agreed. We had already written off NetApp mostly because both NetApp VARs we spoke with were fantastically shady - like Devious Dave's used car lot "We Finance" levels of shady. No thanks. The eventual quote (that was 2 months in the making), with tax, was a few dollars under $60K for 12x2TB SATA disks.

That price is way way too high. I don't know what the procedure is for vetting VARs to make sure they aren't completely horrible but NetApp needs to do something about it. That's at least a 200% markup over list and you should never even be paying list for any IT gear.

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