Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Powdered Toast Man
Jan 25, 2005

TOAST-A-RIFIC!!!
Boss is leaning towards getting some Dell/Equallogic poo poo because I guess they're in the far upper right of Gartner's magic quadrant for SAN/NAS vendors. Is the stuff any good?

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

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:

Why's a netapp root vol 160GB minimum? Right now my controller is using all of 5GB. I'm moving the root vol according to this KB, but of course the original root vol is 2+TB because it was create on an aggregate of 3TB disks. The KB also fails to mention how to actually move the data (vol copy to a restricted volume).

I tried resizing the original root vol but it won't go below 160GB.

Can I copy the root vol into a new one, re-size this new one (to say, 10GB) then make it the new root vol?

The minimum root volume size was increased significantly in 8.0. There are a few contributing factors. Larger core files due to more memory utilization in 8.0 is one, and a wafliron mode called optional_commit that requires a lot of memory and can end up using root volume space as paging space is the other main one. There's also some increase in logging as well. Most of that space won't get used except in very specific circumstances, but it needs to be there to prevent root from filling and bad things from happening.

To move the root volume you only actually need to move /etc. The "cleanest" way to do it is to create a new volume and ndmpcopy /vol/<oldroot>/etc to /vol/<newroot>/etc, then change the root volume option for the new volume. This assumes that you don't also have a home share or other user data on the root volume that you want to move. I generally get all user data off of the root vol as soon as possible so users can't fill up root.

You won't be able to set the root volume option on any volume that does not meet the minimum size requirements, so you're locked in to 160GB min (varies by platform as a function of memory size and number of cores) and thick provisioning.

Edit: PTM - That's an incredibly stupid reason to go with a particular vendor, assuming that's legitimately his reasoning. But Equallogic is good storage and most people here who have used it seem to like it a lot. It's iSCSI only and the scaling model is a little different but if that fits your needs then you'll probably be pretty happy with it.

YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Aug 16, 2012

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Great info as usual, thanks!

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Boss is leaning towards getting some Dell/Equallogic poo poo because I guess they're in the far upper right of Gartner's magic quadrant for SAN/NAS vendors. Is the stuff any good?
If you can swing iSCSI only it's pretty good.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Boss is leaning towards getting some Dell/Equallogic poo poo because I guess they're in the far upper right of Gartner's magic quadrant for SAN/NAS vendors. Is the stuff any good?

So they're not even on the NAS one as it doesn't do NAS right out the box. If you do a google search for the Quadrant you'll see it's EMC and Netapp in the top right (2011 is the only one I could find online).

When it comes to Midrange SAN it's a different matter. There are a load of good contenders these days just make sure on the MQ that when it says 'Dell' it means Equallogic and not Compellent - it may be in the far right corner for Compellent and not equallogic.

In any event as said above, EQL isn't bad kit regardless.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Vanilla posted:

So they're not even on the NAS one as it doesn't do NAS right out the box. If you do a google search for the Quadrant you'll see it's EMC and Netapp in the top right (2011 is the only one I could find online).

When it comes to Midrange SAN it's a different matter. There are a load of good contenders these days just make sure on the MQ that when it says 'Dell' it means Equallogic and not Compellent - it may be in the far right corner for Compellent and not equallogic.

In any event as said above, EQL isn't bad kit regardless.

You are behind the curve - there is a dedicated EqualLogic NAS called FS7500 and it's a pretty screamin' good box, running Dell's Fluid FS which is built on Exanet's file system (Dell bought Exanet's IP in early 2010, for Michael Dell's ashtray change.) The nicest thing is EQL's signature simplicity: it integrates into the same browser-based mgmt stack, you can manage any EQL unit via any other EQL unit, SAN or NAS.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
So my work just got an Equillogic PS4100 for our DR site, however our Sr. Sysadmin who is going to be setting it up is on vacation for two weeks or so. :swoon:

Having never had the opportunity to fool around with anything SAN related (and having gotten approval from my boss), what would be a good starting point for me to start configuring this thing?

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003
We have some 4100's, they are cake. EQL's documentation should be enough to get you up and running. If you can, install esxi on a workstation or something and get that talking to the SAN. If you have a pair of spare switches then make the setup redundant.

sanchez fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Aug 16, 2012

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Beelzebubba9 posted:

I'm going to bump this too. The internet seems to have very good things to say about Nimble's product, and the people I know who use them really like them, but it wasn't in a production or similarly stressed environment.

....or do I need to be SA's $250K guinea pig?

I've got a Nimble CS-220 in production. Ask away.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005

sanchez posted:

We have some 4100's, they are cake. EQL's documentation should be enough to get you up and running. If you can, install esxi on a workstation or something and get that talking to the SAN. If you have a pair of spare switches then make the setup redundant.

Unfortunately that's the one thing we are lacking (spare networking hardware) :(

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Rhymenoserous posted:

I've got a Nimble CS-220 in production. Ask away.

Is the performance as good as they advertise? Have you had any major issue with bugs? Do you use the snapshot backup feature and if so are you replicating it to an offsite unit or just using a regular backup system?

I'm curious about the hardware since it looks like it's a SuperMicro storage chassis with Nimble branding plastered on top of it. Are the bulk storage drives midline SAS or just regular SATA drives? I know that the SSDs are just consumer level MLC Intel drives but I'm curious about the other drives and their reliability.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Number19 posted:

Is the performance as good as they advertise? Have you had any major issue with bugs? Do you use the snapshot backup feature and if so are you replicating it to an offsite unit or just using a regular backup system?

I'm curious about the hardware since it looks like it's a SuperMicro storage chassis with Nimble branding plastered on top of it. Are the bulk storage drives midline SAS or just regular SATA drives? I know that the SSDs are just consumer level MLC Intel drives but I'm curious about the other drives and their reliability.

1. The performance is pretty loving good honestly. I have the 220 which nets me about 12 TB of storage and it handles two production databases with 150+ users each as well as a bunch of ancillary reporting db's and my primary file and print server/voicemail server etc. Oh and I'm almost 100% virtual so the VHD's are running off of it as well. From my understanding the array is pretty good at figuring out what data is most used and shuffling it over to the SSD's, my SSD Cache hit rate is something like 95%.

2. Bugs: I've been in production for 6 months now and I've only run into one bug: a disk reporting bug which was ironed out in the next patch. I've gotten a much higher bug rate out of EMC than these guys to be frank.

3. I am using the snapshot backup feature but not yet replicating (Waiting for budget to buy another unit).

4. Bulk storage is high capacity SATA

If I had a criticism of the system it's that it's actually a little too simple. It's a fairly barebones san, so you don't get as many of the integration features as you would see in others. Want to restore a backup? You are going to be mounting the latest snapshot: there are no tools to say... automatically mount the last several that you may see in other companies arrays.

But it also compresses like a motherfucker. I'm getting near 12 TB of usable storage out of 7tb of physical disk (Post raid of course).

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Boss is leaning towards getting some Dell/Equallogic poo poo because I guess they're in the far upper right of Gartner's magic quadrant for SAN/NAS vendors. Is the stuff any good?

I have yet to meet an EQL user who wouldn't praise his box - it's fully redundant inside, very easy/simple to manage, does deliver the performance and with the upcoming new firmware release it will do pretty much everything you can ask for incl. synchronous replication, re-thinning, undelete etc etc.

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Wicaeed posted:

Unfortunately that's the one thing we are lacking (spare networking hardware) :(

Nevertheless setting up your EQL shouldn't take more than 30 minutes (worst case.)

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003
The only thing that irritates me about our 4100 on some level is the email alerts send through the main ethernet interfaces and won't use the management port, which is on the subnet that is a lot less restricted than the storage side of things.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Rhymenoserous posted:

3. I am using the snapshot backup feature but not yet replicating (Waiting for budget to buy another unit).
Do you just backup the snapshots to tape/whatever?

quote:

If I had a criticism of the system it's that it's actually a little too simple. It's a fairly barebones san, so you don't get as many of the integration features as you would see in others. Want to restore a backup? You are going to be mounting the latest snapshot: there are no tools to say... automatically mount the last several that you may see in other companies arrays.
Yeah I read this in the documentation that they make public and it's one of the things that scares me the most. I guess if you used a backup system to handle the actual restore process it would work well enough. The restore methods for SQL and Exchange in their demo videos are pretty :stare:

Apparently they are teaming up with CommVault to provide some sort of full solution but that's gonna add a lot of cost to it. Unless you're already using CommVault that is. I'm not but I hate Backup Exec a lot so I might be able to make that change too (assuming that CommVault is any better).

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole
You have to configure all of your hosts to tolerate ~40 seconds of the EQL array being unavailable during firmware upgrades. Maybe this is recommended with other iSCSI arrays, but I haven't ran into it yet?

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


three posted:

You have to configure all of your hosts to tolerate ~40 seconds of the EQL array being unavailable during firmware upgrades. Maybe this is recommended with other iSCSI arrays, but I haven't ran into it yet?

This is the one thing I love about our LeftHand setup. One node can update while the other one keeps serving data and then they switch.

If they manage to get dedupe or even compression on LeftHand units I might be compelled to just stick with what I know but as it stands the units are pretty feature bare.

mungtor
May 3, 2005

Yeah, I hate me too.
Nap Ghost

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Boss is leaning towards getting some Dell/Equallogic poo poo because I guess they're in the far upper right of Gartner's magic quadrant for SAN/NAS vendors. Is the stuff any good?

We've been running 3 Equallogic boxes in a group config for a couple years now for about 14TB of post-RAID storage. They've performed great, the interface is nice, Equallogic support is excellent to talk to.

That said, when they hit hardware EOL we're probably going to replace them with something else. The "Scale Out" philosophy that they bring with every unit having their own controllers, cache, etc, drives up the cost per GB. Instead of tacking on a $15k shelf of disk, you need to add another $50k for another full blown SAN and we don't have the performance requirements to justify it.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Number19 posted:

Do you just backup the snapshots to tape/whatever?

Yeah I read this in the documentation that they make public and it's one of the things that scares me the most. I guess if you used a backup system to handle the actual restore process it would work well enough. The restore methods for SQL and Exchange in their demo videos are pretty :stare:

Apparently they are teaming up with CommVault to provide some sort of full solution but that's gonna add a lot of cost to it. Unless you're already using CommVault that is. I'm not but I hate Backup Exec a lot so I might be able to make that change too (assuming that CommVault is any better).

This is the sort of problem you'll run into with Nimble. They seem to have a very good core product but building up a suite of products that integrates array level features with things like Exchange, and SQL, and VMWare takes time and they simply haven't been around long enough to have a mature suite of software to complement the hardware.

The other issue is that they are trying to add features at a pretty aggressive pace to reach parity with more established vendors and I'd worry about the ability of a company that is still relatively small, with a relatively small installed base, doing proper QA on all of those new features.

I think the consensus seems to be that if you're comfortable using a less established vendor and your needs are relatively modest (small/medium business) then they offer a pretty compelling choice.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


NippleFloss posted:

This is the sort of problem you'll run into with Nimble. They seem to have a very good core product but building up a suite of products that integrates array level features with things like Exchange, and SQL, and VMWare takes time and they simply haven't been around long enough to have a mature suite of software to complement the hardware.

The other issue is that they are trying to add features at a pretty aggressive pace to reach parity with more established vendors and I'd worry about the ability of a company that is still relatively small, with a relatively small installed base, doing proper QA on all of those new features.

I think the consensus seems to be that if you're comfortable using a less established vendor and your needs are relatively modest (small/medium business) then they offer a pretty compelling choice.

I'm also worried that someone's going to come along and buy them and they will become like LeftHand where the tech is pretty good but after getting bought the software just stagnates and no real developement work is done on it.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

three posted:

You have to configure all of your hosts to tolerate ~40 seconds of the EQL array being unavailable during firmware upgrades. Maybe this is recommended with other iSCSI arrays, but I haven't ran into it yet?

This is fairly normal. Usually the handoff is smooth (i.e. within a few seconds) this is just an rear end covering number.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Number19 posted:

Do you just backup the snapshots to tape/whatever?

Yeah I read this in the documentation that they make public and it's one of the things that scares me the most. I guess if you used a backup system to handle the actual restore process it would work well enough. The restore methods for SQL and Exchange in their demo videos are pretty :stare:

Apparently they are teaming up with CommVault to provide some sort of full solution but that's gonna add a lot of cost to it. Unless you're already using CommVault that is. I'm not but I hate Backup Exec a lot so I might be able to make that change too (assuming that CommVault is any better).

Right now we're not offloading anything (Yeah I know). Please bear in mind that this organization had 0 operational level backups/snapshots of any kind with the exception of the SQL databases (And only the DB backups themselves) prior to me being hired about 9 months ago.

They had 10 servers. No server backups. No file level backups. Oh and the primary and secondary ERP server were sitting on a UPS with a dead battery pack, and we're in a region well known for power spikes during: thunderstorms, wind storms, toddler crossing the yard, owner burps, local power company spontaneously combusting, etc. Everything was on 6-7 year old servers: all bare metal installs.

My first day on the job I was getting a walkthrough of the server room and a thunderstorm shot through. I watched as five servers snapped off then back on six times in a row and had a small panic attack. I stomped my feet and yelled at the guy in charge and demanded he purchase a new UPS because "This is how you lose raid arrays".

Two weeks later I lost my first raid array! No backups! Old Custom Software system who we couldn't get support for to do a reinstall! FUN!

FAKE EDIT: The best part is the guy who had run the companies IT previously actually had purchased a UPS to replace the one that was dead. He just didn't buy one with enough power capacity nor the right power input for our building. So he hid it behind the racks so no one would yell at him. It now sits on my workbench as a testament to :wtc:

Real Edit: Now almost everything is on 4 brand new HP servers running ESX 5, managed from my shiny Vcenter interface, everything on SAN and snapshotted. I've got copies of every major production VM tucked away on USB drives. It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than the frantic sobbing that was going on months back.

Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 16, 2012

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

szlevi posted:

I have yet to meet an EQL user who wouldn't praise his box - it's fully redundant inside

Raising my hand here as a storage idiot again. I'm still evaluating my options for buying an entry level SAN to replace our aging HP MSA's. One roadblock I'm hitting is that my boss is really, really mistrustful of a SAN as a single point of failure. Despite having redundant controllers, each with their own ethernet ports and dedicated switches, their own power supplies plugged into different PDU's, and the disks themselves protected with RAID, he still sees one physical box and thinks there's a decent chance the entire thing will die. For this reason we have two MSA's and our applications' architecture is such that we can lose one entire enclosure and still limp along.

Is that an eventuality most of you plan for, losing both controllers in your SAN (or the entire RAID array)? Edit: We do have a DR site, I'm talking about within your primary site so one can poo poo the bed without needing the DR site.

Docjowles fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Aug 16, 2012

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Number19 posted:

I'm also worried that someone's going to come along and buy them and they will become like LeftHand where the tech is pretty good but after getting bought the software just stagnates and no real developement work is done on it.

FWIW the guys at Nimble seem pretty intent on building themselves into a real competitor, rather than selling out at the first opportunity. A lot of their executive staff came from high positions in other well established companies like NetApp and Data Domain so they had ample opportunity to cash in in those positions.

The other reason I think it's unlikely is that I don't really see who would buy them. Dell and HP have already acquired very similar products. Nimble has nothing in their portfolio has nothing to offer NetApp. IBM has invested a lot recently in developing their own unified storage platform and picking up Nimble would require taking focus off of that. EMC already has products that fill the same niche Nimble does. Hitachi is really the only vendor left that they could help, but that product doesn't fit very well with the rest of Hitachi's portfolio.

Of course EMC has a tendency to try to buy everyone at some point or another, so who knows.

Docjowles posted:

...stuff about a dumb boss...

Most organizations that have any business continuity requirements have a cold/warm/hot site that they replicate all primary site data too. Any event that will bring down your entire SAN with all of it's redundancy has probably left your entire datacenter as a smoking crater in the ground. Having two identical SANs that are already internally physically redundant in the same datacenter, housing the same data, is wasteful and pointless in *almost* every case. Having two geographically separated SANs with the same data is a good idea.

This assumes that you're buying from a vendor that knows what they're doing, of course. There are some vendors where a failure on one half of a cluster will absolutely break the whole thing (I'm looking at you StorageTek 6540). But most reputable vendors can deliver at least 5 9's uptime and some will do better than that.

I think it was Misogynist earlier in the thread who said part of any installation or POC should be the customer pulling out different power cables, network cables, expansion shelf cabling, etc, and ensuring that the array survives everything you would expect it to, without disruption.

Besides, you've likely got a bunch of more serious single points of failure in your environment. Application coding and user error are generally the biggest. It's a lot more likely that a DBA will accidentally delete a row from a production table, or that a coder will mismanage memory cleanup, than that your 100% hardware redundant SAN is going to mysteriously combust, untouched, and take all of you data with it.

YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Aug 16, 2012

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Docjowles posted:

Raising my hand here as a storage idiot again. I'm still evaluating my options for buying an entry level SAN to replace our aging HP MSA's. One roadblock I'm hitting is that my boss is really, really mistrustful of a SAN as a single point of failure. Despite having redundant controllers, each with their own ethernet ports and dedicated switches, their own power supplies plugged into different PDU's, and the disks themselves protected with RAID, he still sees one physical box and thinks there's a decent chance the entire thing will die. For this reason we have two MSA's and our applications' architecture is such that we can lose one entire enclosure and still limp along.

Is that an eventuality most of you plan for, losing both controllers in your SAN (or the entire RAID array)? Edit: We do have a DR site, I'm talking about within your primary site so one can poo poo the bed without needing the DR site.

The thing is: it's not really a single box. It's two boxes in a single chassis, they don't share a common interface and usually use heartbeats of some form to check eachothers health. I have only seen both controllers go down a single time in the last 10 years of working with various models of SAN, and that was at a budget web hosting company running one of the old EMC NS series all in one SAN/NAS cabinets. The reason it went down? They went Active/Active on the controllers when they went over the point where a single controller could handle the workload they were dealing with. So what happened was they had two controllers spinning at about 75% capacity and one took a poo poo. Do you know what happens when you dump double the load on an already taxed controller? It takes a poo poo too.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

NippleFloss posted:

FWIW the guys at Nimble seem pretty intent on building themselves into a real competitor, rather than selling out at the first opportunity. A lot of their executive staff came from high positions in other well established companies like NetApp and Data Domain so they had ample opportunity to cash in in those positions.

The other reason I think it's unlikely is that I don't really see who would buy them. Dell and HP have already acquired very similar products. Nimble has nothing in their portfolio has nothing to offer NetApp. IBM has invested a lot recently in developing their own unified storage platform and picking up Nimble would require taking focus off of that. EMC already has products that fill the same niche Nimble does. Hitachi is really the only vendor left that they could help, but that product doesn't fit very well with the rest of Hitachi's portfolio.

Of course EMC has a tendency to try to buy everyone at some point or another, so who knows.

EMC would actually do well to pick up the product. The basic storage architecture EMC uses hasn't really changed over the last 10 years. They could also learn something about GUI development as well because gently caress unisphere right up it's worthless rear end (Still better than what came before but drat.)

Of course they won't do it because then they wouldn't be able to make bank by selling those people those sweet NAS management classes (That one was pretty good tbh) or the terrible VNX SAN management class (Ugh kill me).

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


I would say firmware upgrades are another place where you can get nailed.

I worry less about the hardware and more about the software. The idea that a glitch could wipeout the configuration or that a firmware update could blowup somehow but still proceed to the 2nd controller scares the crap out of me.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Rhymenoserous posted:

Right now we're not offloading anything (Yeah I know). Please bear in mind that this organization had 0 operational level backups/snapshots of any kind with the exception of the SQL databases (And only the DB backups themselves) prior to me being hired about 9 months ago.

They had 10 servers. No server backups. No file level backups. Oh and the primary and secondary ERP server were sitting on a UPS with a dead battery pack, and we're in a region well known for power spikes during: thunderstorms, wind storms, toddler crossing the yard, owner burps, local power company spontaneously combusting, etc. Everything was on 6-7 year old servers: all bare metal installs.

My first day on the job I was getting a walkthrough of the server room and a thunderstorm shot through. I watched as five servers snapped off then back on six times in a row and had a small panic attack. I stomped my feet and yelled at the guy in charge and demanded he purchase a new UPS because "This is how you lose raid arrays".

Two weeks later I lost my first raid array! No backups! Old Custom Software system who we couldn't get support for to do a reinstall! FUN!

FAKE EDIT: The best part is the guy who had run the companies IT previously actually had purchased a UPS to replace the one that was dead. He just didn't buy one with enough power capacity nor the right power input for our building. So he hid it behind the racks so no one would yell at him. It now sits on my workbench as a testament to :wtc:

If I still have to offload backups and manage restores using a data protection suite then I'm probably just going to evaluate the Nimble from a performance perspective and compare the overall costs to a solution that has all those features like a Netapp filer.

Beelzebubba9
Feb 24, 2004

three posted:

How comfortable are you with being one of a very small number of users? It will mean you will be the one running into bugs more often than the other vendors that probably have just as many bugs but have more people to find them and fix them before you notice.

Considering the horror stories Goons have shared about their VNX 5300s, I'm not sure Nimble will be any worse. The fact that I haven't found anything really bad about them on the internet actually worries me more than a few 'something broke, support fixed really fast' anecdotes would.

Regardless, they're coming in for a Song and Dance (hopefully) next week so I'll see what my upper management thinks about the risk:feature:value ratio they offer.

Does anyone here have questions you'd like me to ask their team?

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

bull3964 posted:

I would say firmware upgrades are another place where you can get nailed.

I worry less about the hardware and more about the software. The idea that a glitch could wipeout the configuration or that a firmware update could blowup somehow but still proceed to the 2nd controller scares the crap out of me.

I think a lot of it is this, yeah. Firmware update screwing the pooch, or one controller dying and the failover not happening correctly, stuff like that.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Beelzebubba9 posted:

Considering the horror stories Goons have shared about their VNX 5300s, I'm not sure Nimble will be any worse. The fact that I haven't found anything really bad about them on the internet actually worries me more than a few 'something broke, support fixed really fast' anecdotes would.

Regardless, they're coming in for a Song and Dance (hopefully) next week so I'll see what my upper management thinks about the risk:feature:value ratio they offer.

Does anyone here have questions you'd like me to ask their team?

Yeah they're coming after us hard too and we're not even all that big of a shop. We're 6ish months away from making and sort of decision and they're already trying to get me to see a demo and want to see if they can accelerate our timeline.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Number19 posted:

If I still have to offload backups and manage restores using a data protection suite then I'm probably just going to evaluate the Nimble from a performance perspective and compare the overall costs to a solution that has all those features like a Netapp filer.

It has replication features, I'm just waiting for my company to stop dragging it's feet and let me purchase one of the smaller arrays to hold offsite snapshots.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Number19 posted:

Yeah they're coming after us hard too and we're not even all that big of a shop. We're 6ish months away from making and sort of decision and they're already trying to get me to see a demo and want to see if they can accelerate our timeline.

They did this to me too, I was told in confidence by a tech that they put some pretty hard Quota's on their sales guys, and that he actually transfered to the technical end to avoid the stress.

I remember a point a long time ago when NetApp was just as annoying.

Docjowles posted:

I think a lot of it is this, yeah. Firmware update screwing the pooch, or one controller dying and the failover not happening correctly, stuff like that.

My rear end in a top hat used to pucker during EMC flair code updates.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Docjowles posted:

I think a lot of it is this, yeah. Firmware update screwing the pooch, or one controller dying and the failover not happening correctly, stuff like that.

This is possible, but then so is it possible that SCCM pushes a patch that breaks all of your workstations. Oracle pushing an update that, say, switches the boot order so that ZFS comes up before iSCSI and causes none of your SUN servers to see their storage when they boot (a real thing that happened). Does that mean you never patch or update anything? In the rare event that a firmware upgrade hoses everything you just roll back to the previous version and call up your sales people and throw a fit. It sucks, but the occasional software bug is a part of IT life.

And if controller fail-over doesn't work properly then how is that worse than having a failure in which fail-over isn't an option? In either case the system is down, just the same, but in the first case at least you can yell and scream at a vendor to make it work better.

EDIT: None of this applies to EMC, never update anything on EMC gear ever, don't even touch it unless it is to strike the match you will use to burn it to the ground.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Rhymenoserous posted:

EMC would actually do well to pick up the product. The basic storage architecture EMC uses hasn't really changed over the last 10 years. They could also learn something about GUI development as well because gently caress unisphere right up it's worthless rear end (Still better than what came before but drat.)

Of course they won't do it because then they wouldn't be able to make bank by selling those people those sweet NAS management classes (That one was pretty good tbh) or the terrible VNX SAN management class (Ugh kill me).

I agree that I think it would be a win for EMC because it's definitely better than what they've got right now. But, as you said, they won't, because they're pimping the hell out of VNX and picking up another storage vendor that competes in the same areas would be a tacit admission that VNX kind of sucks. And because then they couldn't continue to obfuscate things in an effort to extort money out of customers for professional services and classes.

At NetApp Professional Services are not treated as a separate profit center. Generally PS is meant to basically break even internally while accelerating sales. Im told that at EMC PS is a large profit generating portion of the organization, distinct from sales. I suspect that a lot of this is by design, and why EMC products are behind still behind the curve when it comes to simplicity and manageability.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

NippleFloss posted:


At NetApp Professional Services are not treated as a separate profit center. Generally PS is meant to basically break even internally while accelerating sales. Im told that at EMC PS is a large profit generating portion of the organization, distinct from sales. I suspect that a lot of this is by design, and why EMC products are behind still behind the curve when it comes to simplicity and manageability.

This is absolutely true: on the higher end units EMC drat near hands you the hardware while selling you support contracts that will make your wallet bleed.

Number19
May 14, 2003

HOCKEY OWNS
FUCK YEAH


Rhymenoserous posted:

They did this to me too, I was told in confidence by a tech that they put some pretty hard Quota's on their sales guys, and that he actually transfered to the technical end to avoid the stress.

I remember a point a long time ago when NetApp was just as annoying.

I'm perfectly content to string them along for as long as I need to. They're holding a cruise event next week that should be fun. Only problem is that once you're on the boat you can't leave until they get back and I only have so much tolerance for sales guys in person.

Edit: oh man it has two groups of guys that have been hounding me for a long time. Maybe I should skip this one, especially if I can't escape my any other means than jumping into some very polluted water.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
Does anyone know much about the Dell Online courses for Into to EqualLogic PS Series Storage Arrays? Specificially if we purchase training for them (but share a login for the account the training was purchased on) can we view the training at any time even after completing it?

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

three posted:

You have to configure all of your hosts to tolerate ~40 seconds of the EQL array being unavailable during firmware upgrades. Maybe this is recommended with other iSCSI arrays, but I haven't ran into it yet?

I never did it but IIRC my values are ~30 secs and my hosts all tolerate failovers just fine...

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

szlevi
Sep 10, 2010

[[ POKE 65535,0 ]]

Wicaeed posted:

Does anyone know much about the Dell Online courses for Into to EqualLogic PS Series Storage Arrays? Specificially if we purchase training for them (but share a login for the account the training was purchased on) can we view the training at any time even after completing it?

I cannot fathom what they can teach you that you cannot learn yourself in a few days, for free...

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply