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Arishtat posted:The modular controller units are very narrow and deep. The pre-HPE Supermicro hardware was only 30ish inches deep. The Unity XT line is looking pretty tempting. Trying to physically get a demo unit to play with currently.
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Oct 4, 2019 02:42
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Unity is just warmed over VNX. I guess if they're practically giving it away then why not, but it shouldn't be at the top of anyone's list based on technology.
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Oct 4, 2019 16:30
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Unity is just warmed over VNX. I guess if they're practically giving it away then why not, but it shouldn't be at the top of anyone's list based on technology. I have mostly narrowed this down to Pure and Unity XT. Pure is a good bit more expensive and I can get almost double the usable space per array with Unity XT. It hit all the check boxes for me and is also NVMe ready if we decide to go that route for some more performance hungry datasets (probably will never need that in my environment).
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Oct 4, 2019 16:40
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Unity is warmed over VNX which is warmed over Clariion mashed together with warmed over Celerra. Buying a VNXe was one of the few technical decisions I've ever made in my IT career that I truly regretted.
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Oct 5, 2019 00:46
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So anyone actually test/run the Unity or Unity XT lines?
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Oct 5, 2019 00:54
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Moey posted:So anyone actually test/run the Unity or Unity XT lines? I inherited a bunch of Unity 300 arrays, a 450f, and about to do a head swap on a 300 to a 500. They get the job done, price points are good, and upgrades are easy.
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Oct 6, 2019 17:01
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If you buy an all flash array from a reputable manufacturer (i.e. not tegile) it's generally going to be fine. They're like modern cars in the sense that you have to try really hard to get a truly bad one. But Unity is the some of the oldest tech, with the most convoluted code (even NetApp is better in that respect) so you end up with things like still needing to set traditional raid levels, or poorly performing data reduction that was bolted on after the fact, or performance impacting bugs due to a poorly understood and speaking code base that has grown inorganically... It'll work but youre probably going to have a less pleasant ownership experience than you would with some competitors. The price may be so good that it's worth the trade off, but it's still worth considering. If Pure is too expensive Nimble might be a consideration.
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Oct 6, 2019 21:39
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Not really enterprise storage per-se, but can anyone recommend a general use NAS for a business? This is mostly scratch space, some non-critical backups via veeam, some file shares for test environments, etc. We have a synology thing right now but we could use something with 10Gb ports and is preferably rack mounted. I intend to fill it with some high-cap helium disks and an SSD cache, much like our current setup.
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Oct 10, 2019 14:26
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Get a Synology NAS that rackmounts - there's really not much in the way of other options if you want to avoid getting into a situation where you have to buy disks at an inflated price from Dell or whoever. Just make sure you get a box with a Xeon and chuck some extra RAM into it, Synology really seem to love to put anaemic hardware specs in their boxes and they run out of steam quite easily. I believe they have a promo on where you can test drive the FlashStation boxes as well.
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Oct 10, 2019 15:09
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YOLOsubmarine posted:If you buy an all flash array from a reputable manufacturer (i.e. not tegile) it's generally going to be fine. They're like modern cars in the sense that you have to try really hard to get a truly bad one. As someone who's company bought an SC5020 last year, I will never buy a piece of Dell hardware again, holy poo poo. I pushed to go with Pure or Nimble, but this things is just a dumpster fire.
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Oct 10, 2019 18:29
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My Synology DS1511+ 5-bay that's been chugging along like a champ for years died today. I powered it down, moved it to another room, plugged it back in, and now when I try to boot the power light flashes, the fans spin up for less than a second, then it turns off. After a few seconds it repeats that loop indefinitely. Doesn't matter if there are all, one, or no drives in it, behavior is the same. Synology support says that's symptomatic of a bad/dead motherboard and since this thing is so old, they don't have replacement parts. I'm trying to figure out what my best next steps/options are. There are a couple used, working 1511+ on ebay but they're in the $350-$550 range (including disks that I don't need). A new DS1019+ is $640 and seems like a better move for only a couple hundred more. My inclination is to buy a diskless 1019+ to get back up and running. Any obvious problems with that plan that I'm not seeing? I should be able to stick the 5 drives from my old 1511+ into a new 1019+ and it'll see the array just fine, right? Is there any compelling reason to drop the extra $100 for a 6-bay 1618+ instead of the 1019+? I may also set a watch alert for a diskless 1511+ for <$300 on eBay to cannibalize for parts but I half think that trying to bring 8 year old hardware back to life is a fool's errand.
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Oct 11, 2019 00:06
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Lawen posted:My Synology DS1511+ 5-bay that's been chugging along like a champ for years died today. I powered it down, moved it to another room, plugged it back in, and now when I try to boot the power light flashes, the fans spin up for less than a second, then it turns off. After a few seconds it repeats that loop indefinitely. Oh lord this is the exact situation that I've been dreading with my Netgear ReadyNAS 316 6-bay which I purchased back in August 2013 (Originally with 6x2TB HDDs but I swapped them with 6x4TB HDDs a couple years ago). It's been running fine for so long I feel like such a failure is overdue.  Lawen posted:I should be able to stick the 5 drives from my old 1511+ into a new 1019+ and it'll see the array just fine, right? Might be best to raise a support call if possible to verify that. I know it's the case with most vendors but always better to be safe than sorry. Lawen posted:Is there any compelling reason to drop the extra $100 for a 6-bay 1618+ instead of the 1019+? Always nice to have an extra bay IMO.
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Oct 13, 2019 06:58
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Anyone going to NetApp insight next week? I'm slowly taking on storage from my boss, but I've done so little administration that I don't feel that I really know NetApp yet. Gonna take the NCDA test because it's free, but other than that, not really sure what value to get out of the conference - aside from all the delicious dinners with reps and vendors each night 
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Oct 26, 2019 18:30
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Alfajor posted:Anyone going to NetApp insight next week? Not going to Insight, but the free online training link below can help you get up to speed. https://www.netapp.com/us/services-support/university/index.aspx
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Oct 28, 2019 01:31
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^ yep, I've at least done some of that, so the chances of me passing the NCDA are more than zero. We'll see!
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Oct 28, 2019 05:11
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Spring Heeled Jack posted:As someone who's company bought an SC5020 last year, I will never buy a piece of Dell hardware again, holy poo poo. I pushed to go with Pure or Nimble, but this things is just a dumpster fire. I'll bite. Curious what issues you are having?
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Oct 30, 2019 13:44
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1000101 posted:One nice thing about Pure is their evergreen support program. Basically if you stay current they'll keep your gear current without having to do hardware refreshes. It sounds insane but it ends up being a great way to keep customers giving you money for your product. As a storage admin I have a ton of experience with the arrays listed below and I have to say that Pure, by far, has been the easiest, fastest and most bang for your buck I've ever worked with. It's expensive to get your foot in the door but if managed correctly you can achieve great reduction rates (6 to 1 and up) and make your storage stretch a looooong way. We've had a few glitches when working with vvols but I think that technology hasn't matured enough for enterprise level architecture. If you can get your hands on a POC definitely do it. And as mentioned above, the free controller upgrade every 3 years (with zero downtime) is fantastic. HP XP256 HP XP512 HP XP1024 HP XP10000 HP XP24000 HP XP P9500 HP MSA P2300fc HP EVA5000 HP EVA6000 EMC Clarion EMC Isilon (NAS) Violin Pure Storage //X70R2
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Nov 5, 2019 00:08
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We’ve got a single NetApp AFFA200 with 12 3.8tb SSDs and we’d like to add another 12 to fill out that shelf. We’ve recently engaged a new partner due to our old ones being acquired and falling off the face of the planet. They have advised us it is better to add a whole new shelf with controllers to hold the extra 12 drives as having a fully populated A200 would overwhelm the controllers. They also said it’s cheaper to buy drives including in a shelf rather than just buy packs of drives to insert. Is this just bs? It seems crazy to me that it can’t handle a fully populated shelf. Part of the appeal was the storage density in 2RU.
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Nov 29, 2019 23:26
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greatapoc posted:We’ve got a single NetApp AFFA200 with 12 3.8tb SSDs and we’d like to add another 12 to fill out that shelf. We’ve recently engaged a new partner due to our old ones being acquired and falling off the face of the planet. They have advised us it is better to add a whole new shelf with controllers to hold the extra 12 drives as having a fully populated A200 would overwhelm the controllers. They also said it’s cheaper to buy drives including in a shelf rather than just buy packs of drives to insert. They’re kind of correct, but also giving you bad advice. The drives won’t “overwhelm” the controller. The causality is backwards. It’s quite true that an A220 doesn’t have the horsepower to fully saturate 24 SSD drives, but that’s not a problem unless you’re already performance limited, and I doubt you are. It’s a fact with most all flash arrays that the CPU is the bottleneck once you get past a relatively small number of drives. But you probably don’t need millions of IOPS, you probably need tens of thousands of consistent low latency IOPS which your current system will provide just as well with 24 drives. It is often true that drives are cheaper when bought along with controllers due to the way standard discounts are structured, but you don’t want to add a new array every time you need to add capacity, and dumb pricing is a problem for NetApp and your partner to solve, not you. And if they truly won’t sell you 12 drives for less than they will sell you 12 drives plus a controller you can always buy the controller plus drives and then sell the controllers on eBay and stick the drives into the existing system.
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Nov 30, 2019 11:12
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YOLOsubmarine posted:It is often true that drives are cheaper when bought along with controllers due to the way standard discounts are structured, but you don’t want to add a new array every time you need to add capacity, and dumb pricing is a problem for NetApp and your partner to solve, not you. And if they truly won’t sell you 12 drives for less than they will sell you 12 drives plus a controller you can always buy the controller plus drives and then sell the controllers on eBay and stick the drives into the existing system.
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Nov 30, 2019 12:40
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Re: Tegile chat. We were speaking with them about a mid-priced solution for our customers that don't want to pay  for Pure and the Tegile spinout at WD happened right in the middle of that. VP of ENG was only on the adversarial customer call (which was p. bad) but the promoter client call was p. good. They were immediately out and we haven't gone back to do another market analysis and continue to gently caress our customers who don't need NVMe over. It rules.
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Dec 5, 2019 16:57
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Crunchy Black posted:Re: Tegile chat. Tegile is bad storage with tons of issues that may not exist in 3 years. They've had 3 owners in 3 years and their developers sucked even when they had money and stability.
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Dec 6, 2019 17:29
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greatapoc posted:Thanks for that. Buying the shelf and ripping the drives out is what we're leaning towards at the moment. Currently our IOPS are 11k for most of the day spiking to 250k for SnapMirrors. CPU is 18% spiking to 26% for SnapMirror. Peak Performance is at 75%. Update to this. Might be changing the whole thing up and going HCI instead. Our aging c7000 blade system is due for replacement next year and it appears the NetApp HCI system might be a suitable replacement which can also shift some of the storage away from our AFF negating the need to expand it. It appears as though SolidFire licensing isn't as ridiculously expensive as AFF licensing making comparable storage much cheaper while also adding in the compute nodes. We're waiting on confirmation that NetApp HCI supports Hyper-V. The NetApp reps swear that it does and are willing to setup a demo for us but our reseller isn't convinced. Does anyone have any wisdom on NetApp HCI (or really any other flavour of HCI, we're not locked into NetApp) and compatibility with Hyper-V?
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Dec 7, 2019 04:28
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Out of curiosity, what's your host/storage size/storage performance needs?
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Dec 7, 2019 07:47
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Moey posted:Out of curiosity, what's your host/storage size/storage performance needs? Approximately 600 hosts across 6 locations access mostly internal systems that are housed at our HO (ERP attached to an SQL database which gets pounded all day, document storage, etc). Currently have an AFF A200 in the HO with 12x 3.8TB SSDs and a FAS 2620 at the DR site with 24x 4TB HDDs for mirrors. We've also got a 300TB LTO6 tape array. We're at roughly 90% on the AFF and 75% on the FAS. The AFF is Fibre Channel to the c7000 which holds all of our standalone servers and hypervisors. NetApp have proposed a 3 compute node, 25TB SolidFire storage node HCI system to replace the blades and shift some of the storage away from the AFF to avoid having to expand the AFF for now. They're claiming 4:1 on the SolidFire and guaranteeing 3:1 but we ran into the guarantee on the AFF (currently getting 1.7:1, they guaranteed 2:1) and they knocked it back due to already having encrypted and compressed data. greatapoc fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Dec 7, 2019 |
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Dec 7, 2019 08:44
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greatapoc posted:Update to this. Might be changing the whole thing up and going HCI instead. Our aging c7000 blade system is due for replacement next year and it appears the NetApp HCI system might be a suitable replacement which can also shift some of the storage away from our AFF negating the need to expand it. It appears as though SolidFire licensing isn't as ridiculously expensive as AFF licensing making comparable storage much cheaper while also adding in the compute nodes. NetApp HCI isn't really HCI. Whether you care about this probably depends on your needs and what you think the benefits of HCI are, but it's just Solidfire storage and Fujitsu compute nodes mixed into 4 node chassis's, along with some orchestration of the standup and expansion of clusters. This means that you can run pretty much anything on the compute nodes including a mixture of hypervisor nodes and bare metal nodes, or whatever else you want to do. So sure, you can run hyper-v. Your experience will be pretty much identical to buying some compute and some Solidfire storage separately though. If you're only doing if for cost reasons then that's probably fine, but if you want the operational benefits of real HCI then you're missing out. That said, a 3 node cluster probably isn't creating much management overhead anyway so I doubt there's much operational overhead to lower and a real HCI solution like Nutanix or Hyperflex will likely be more expensive and not provide much benefit.
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Dec 7, 2019 19:35
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Crunchy Black posted:Re: Tegile chat. Friends don't let friends buy tegile.
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Dec 8, 2019 15:50
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Vanilla posted:Friends don't let friends buy tegile. Fair enough, what's a flash, scaleable solution we can go to in the segment with triple 9s?
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Dec 8, 2019 16:40
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Crunchy Black posted:Fair enough, what's a flash, scaleable solution we can go to in the segment with triple 9s? BTW I actually just came out of a 2 year posting Haitus to post that! If Pure pricing is putting you off I'd consider Nimble. Well made, infosight is cool and they come in at a reasonable bang for the buck. It sounds like you are working for some kind of reseller that is looking to add to your portfolio? No harm in pitting Pure and nimble against each other and see if they race to the bottom. Edit: Also closer to six nines Vanilla fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 00:57
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Crunchy Black posted:Fair enough, what's a flash, scaleable solution we can go to in the segment with triple 9s? Pure, Nimble, NetApp....anything but Tegile. Basically anything from a reputable vendor will get you at least 5 9s if managed properly.
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Dec 9, 2019 02:12
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Hey, I've been dipping into enterprise grade NAS lately, and was wondering if there was even a valid use case for something like the new Synology UC3200? I could see it viable, but it seems rather excessive for just lun storage. I figured you enterprise peeps might have a bit more perspective.
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Dec 11, 2019 22:23
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As far as I know Synology doesn't have 24x7 support, so that rules them out for most enterprises.
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Dec 12, 2019 01:22
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You aren't going to get anywhere near the same level of support with Synology as you're getting with someone like Pure, and hitless controller upgrades etc. are definitely not going to be a part of the platform, but in exchange you spend a lot less cash. There are third parties offering their own helpdesk and onsite support services for the hardware, but you're not going to be able to take a case up to the development team to get an emergency hotfix created like you'd get if you had an issue with one of the big enterprise vendors. The UC3200 isn't NAS though - it's just iSCSI. iSCSI SAN bundles from bigger vendors like HPE, NetApp's E series etc. can be had dirt cheap if your requirements align with what the vendor has decided to put in a bundle. If you want HA NAS from Synology then you need to wait for the SA3200D, which should fit quite nicely into a gap in the market. I'd pick a Synology box running iSCSI over rolling something together with software, but it's not a particularly exciting proposition.
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Dec 12, 2019 20:54
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YOLOsubmarine posted:NetApp HCI isn't really HCI. Whether you care about this probably depends on your needs and what you think the benefits of HCI are, but it's just Solidfire storage and Fujitsu compute nodes mixed into 4 node chassis's, along with some orchestration of the standup and expansion of clusters.
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Dec 18, 2019 05:51
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Synology fits a great niche for the company size that can justify spending $$$$$$ on production storage but not on spending $$$$$$ for a full replicated storage appliance for backups or DR. Also for cheap test labs or virtual environments where uptime is not critical to the guests running on it. I've had several customers that will drop the money on EMC/NetApp/Whatever for their production storage but dont need or want a full failover DR system and some off-site synology units work great for data replication.
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Dec 20, 2019 01:37
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Digital_Jesus posted:Synology fits a great niche for the company size that can justify spending $$$$$$ on production storage but not on spending $$$$$$ for a full replicated storage appliance for backups or DR. It’s fine for anything where availability and durability are nice-to-haves but not need-to-haves.
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Dec 20, 2019 02:40
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I'm working on a homelab upgrade but I figured the technology involved would be better suited to this thread than the home NAS thread. I want to upgrade an ESXi host with SSDs for the VMHD datastore, without buying a license for vSAN. It's been common knowledge that hardware RAID controllers don't support TRIM, but I was doing some research today and found this: https://www.broadcom.com/support/knowledgebase/1211161496937/trim-and-sgunmap-support-for-lsi-hbas-and-raid-controllers Does this mean that 94xx controllers with IR firmware support TRIM and sg_unmap on the underlying disks in an array? Does ESXi have support for this implementation? The language seems to indicate so, but this has been regarded as 'impossible' for so long I don't think it's really that simple. fatman1683 fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 03:12
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Untrim support on esxi local storage is still unclear. There are some articles that suggests that if the storage is vmfs6 formatted and the controller supports it, it should works but I would still be wary of spending big bucks in materiel without a clear confirmation. If you just want a full ssd vmfs why not running the data store from a flash aware nas? Even QNAP is certified nowadays and supports 25/40g nics
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Dec 29, 2019 20:09
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SlowBloke posted:Untrim support on esxi local storage is still unclear. There are some articles that suggests that if the storage is vmfs6 formatted and the controller supports it, it should works but I would still be wary of spending big bucks in materiel without a clear confirmation. If you just want a full ssd vmfs why not running the data store from a flash aware nas? Even QNAP is certified nowadays and supports 25/40g nics A flash-aware NAS is way outside my homelab budget. I'm looking at ~$250 for a used 9440-8i, another $250 for a 4x2.5" U.2 hot swap bay, and $160 each for a pair of U.2 SSDs. Flash-aware NAS chassis start around $5000, plus the drives and network hardware.
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Dec 30, 2019 07:39
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fatman1683 posted:A flash-aware NAS is way outside my homelab budget. I'm looking at ~$250 for a used 9440-8i, another $250 for a 4x2.5" U.2 hot swap bay, and $160 each for a pair of U.2 SSDs. Any qnap with a x86 something is flash aware(even ones with atoms but those tends to be equipped with very few pcie lanes) and supports vStorage API. You can find chassis starting at 2 grand with ryzens (TS-877-1600-8G) or core i3 (TVS-872XU-i3-4G) if you want plenty of PCIe 3.0 lanes. I had plenty of bad experiences doing homelabs with ghettorigged storage so i now prefer to have storage on its own chassis, even if it's slightly more expensive than embedding it onto the esxi servers. If you still want to go homegrown remember to check if the U.2 backplane/controller includes the cables. I've found u.2 cables to be hilariously expensive in my area.
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Dec 30, 2019 19:17
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