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Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Moey posted:

Just racked a Dell/EMC Unity XT 480F to demo.

I'll report back next week if it functions as intended or if it is a hot dumpster fire.

You are aware they have just announced their new omgPowerStore line to replace all the things? Including unity afaik.

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Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Vanilla posted:

You are aware they have just announced their new omgPowerStore line to replace all the things? Including unity afaik.

I was not. Unity XT was just launched in mid 2019 to my knowledge to phase out the original Unity line.

Edit:

Hmmm. Sure looks very similar but more powerful. I'll have to see how pricing compares.

Moey fucked around with this message at 04:25 on May 12, 2020

Langolas
Feb 12, 2011

My mustache makes me sexy, not the hat

Powerstore and UnityXT use mostly the same hardware. Just some slight differences with the Powerstore hardware having a few extra bells and whistles for options

UnityXT comes down the line from the Clariion/VNX days of succession. Powerstore is Dell taking the various midrange products and making something new and eventually converge the product lines. From what I am told, the underlying block storage functions was made by the XIO guys to plan for NVME and Storage class memory usage. Powerstore's storage operating system will eventually go software defined for integration all over the place in the cloud, whitebox hardware etc according to the sales documents (if we believe them). Powerstore can also be HCI, Scale out or up depending but seems like they have features coming down the line not fully implemented yet.

Essentially one is a new product that will have new product pains. Might be wise to sit and watch what the industry says about it.

Mistikman
Jan 21, 2001

I was born ready. I'm Ron Fucking Swanson.
I am building a new computer using an SFF case.

My current computer has 2 4TB drives in RAID 1 for data storage.

They won't fit inside my new computer, but I am still looking for access to storage, so I was thinking of an external enclosure, but after thinking about it some more, I was thinking I might have better results using a cheap personal use NAS solution.

Does anyone have experience with this who would know if tossing those 2 HDDs into this would be reasonable for file storage needs?

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-DS220j-Diskless-2-Bay/dp/B0855LMP81/ref=sr_1_4

The 2 drives I currently have are a set of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013HNYV8I/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They aren't specified to be NAS drives, and they are about a year and a half old. Could I expect them to last for awhile in a NAS enclosure that would be running 24/7? Since they are in a RAID, if one fails, I won't lose my data, so even if I could probably get a couple years out of them that should be plenty.

SlowBloke
Aug 14, 2017

Mistikman posted:

I am building a new computer using an SFF case.

My current computer has 2 4TB drives in RAID 1 for data storage.

They won't fit inside my new computer, but I am still looking for access to storage, so I was thinking of an external enclosure, but after thinking about it some more, I was thinking I might have better results using a cheap personal use NAS solution.

Does anyone have experience with this who would know if tossing those 2 HDDs into this would be reasonable for file storage needs?

https://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-DS220j-Diskless-2-Bay/dp/B0855LMP81/ref=sr_1_4

The 2 drives I currently have are a set of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013HNYV8I/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They aren't specified to be NAS drives, and they are about a year and a half old. Could I expect them to last for awhile in a NAS enclosure that would be running 24/7? Since they are in a RAID, if one fails, I won't lose my data, so even if I could probably get a couple years out of them that should be plenty.

That's a question for the nas thread but i'll answer it anyway. WD Blue are poo poo for raid purposes(they are what it was once called greens, a lot of nas appliances will throw issues when the disks go to sleep), i would not use them for 24/7 setups like a nas. There are standalone disk chassis like the QNAP TR-004/TR-002 that might fit your disks better.

Aunt Beth
Feb 24, 2006

Baby, you're ready!
Grimey Drawer
This question sort of straddles the line between storage and backups, but has anyone used HubStor or know anyone who does? Veeam is loving around with their licensing just as we're starting to have a need to back up our O365 data so I'm looking at options. They seem almost too good to be true since they can handle VMware backups, cloud backups, O365, and do some nifty archival/retention/compliance stuff, plus storage tiering.

unknown
Nov 16, 2002
Ain't got no stinking title yet!


So many of the backup SaaS companies are attempting to just resell someone else's storage service with a nice markup on each gig.

I deal with cloudberrylab.com / msp360.com (they renamed). They license their software yearly for functions like you mention, and then you give them some cloud storage provider (aws/azure/google/backblaze/etc/etc) account to dump the backups to, which gives some nice transparent pricing and storage compliance assurance. You can signup as a "msp", with just 1 license btw, and everything has a 15 day trial I believe.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Anyone worked with HPE Primera yet? Pros? Cons? We got one for our lab, trying to figure out the future of our storage systems.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

skipdogg posted:

Anyone worked with HPE Primera yet? Pros? Cons? We got one for our lab, trying to figure out the future of our storage systems.

I have, we have two 2-node Primera A650s with a bunch of 7.68TB SSDs.

At the end of the day there's not a lot of difference from 3Par, which we also have, and I've worked with (two 7200s, two 7400s, all 2-node).

Hell, even the HPE support people still refer to Primera as 3Par, and SSMC reports the Primera as a 3Par. :v:
If you've ever worked on a 3Par before, you'll be right at home.

As far as I can tell, there are a few internal upgrades, and the caching system has been re-worked. One of the nice things they've done is build the service processor right in to the controller, so you don't need to deploy a separate appliance or buy the physical service processor, and the updating process has been dramatically simplified.
They also have locked options out in SSMC (I imagine you can probably coax Primera in to doing anything you want using the command line) to encourage best practices, so you can't choose RAID 5 any longer, to give one example. They've clearly taken that approach from Nimble, which is really incredibly restrictive compared to the flexibility of 3Par's InformOS.

If I'm completely honest, I haven't been blown away by the performance (although we could possibly be experiencing some latency due to us running synchronous replication, but I'm not convinced), and some of the old limitations are showing - for example deduped+compressed volumes still have a size limit of 16TiB (although supposedly that's getting changed soon.. and don't start talking to me about VVols, in my opinion there are still too many issues surrounding them).
I'm also not seeing dedupe and compression rates that amaze me, about 1.3x or so. I think they could do with stealing some of Nimble's code in that area (which we also run).

Is there any specific information you're looking for? Have you worked with 3Par before, or with HPE?

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Jul 10, 2020

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Just curious is all.

Went through an acquisition a year and a half ago and we're trying to figure out what new platform to standardize on. Old company was NetApp for everything, had a couple EMC VNX's around from a prior acquisition as well so that's what I'm familiar with. Company that bought us has a mix of many different things. 3Par being one, I think there's a VPLEX somewhere, XtremeIO and some other things.

They just bought us a 3Par 8200 and a Primera 630 to play with in our lab. Might be getting a Dell Powerstore or Unity to compare as well. I've never used 3Par or any HP storage other than a base MSA unit. Really happy with NetApp but that's a no go for ~reasons~

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

skipdogg posted:

Just curious is all.

Went through an acquisition a year and a half ago and we're trying to figure out what new platform to standardize on. Old company was NetApp for everything, had a couple EMC VNX's around from a prior acquisition as well so that's what I'm familiar with. Company that bought us has a mix of many different things. 3Par being one, I think there's a VPLEX somewhere, XtremeIO and some other things.

They just bought us a 3Par 8200 and a Primera 630 to play with in our lab. Might be getting a Dell Powerstore or Unity to compare as well. I've never used 3Par or any HP storage other than a base MSA unit. Really happy with NetApp but that's a no go for ~reasons~

Powerstore is just Unity with a coat of paint much like Primera is just 3Par with a coat of paint. I’m innately skeptical of any of these solutions that have soldiered on from the spinning disk age into the the age of NVMe and storage class memory without a ground up rewrite.

Not that they’re bad, but they are encumbered with technical debt and sometimes the seams show pretty clearly.

Langolas
Feb 12, 2011

My mustache makes me sexy, not the hat

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Powerstore is just Unity with a coat of paint

Read the Pure article on Powerstore I see? I may like the simplicity of Pure's product when I'm selling it selling it , but they have been heavy handed on their marketing

Edit: removed my comments on Powerstore cause I guess I had already posted about it before

Langolas fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Jul 11, 2020

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Langolas posted:

Read the Pure article on Powerstore I see? I may like the simplicity of Pure's product when I'm selling it selling it , but they have been heavy handed on their marketing

Edit: removed my comments on Powerstore cause I guess I had already posted about it before

No, I just work for a Dell partner and know how Dell functions as an organization.

Langolas
Feb 12, 2011

My mustache makes me sexy, not the hat

YOLOsubmarine posted:

No, I just work for a Dell partner and know how Dell functions as an organization.

You do realize Powerstore block stack is brand new built from the ground up by XIO guys? That's why I'm keeping it at arms length because its not proven itself to me yet. Now Powerstore's file implementation definitely comes from the celerra/enas/unity code train. Hard pass on file type implementations on that product.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
I'm having zero issues with the Unity XT 480F units. We are only doing block via iSCSI, and probably got around 3x the space for the same price as Pure.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast
I'm curious, what's happening with the Compellant gear, then? I'm guessing they'll have to pack up their poo poo and go home.
Has anyone used and compared the newest Unity with the newest SC kit? I guess it's a pointless question now

qutius
Apr 2, 2003
NO PARTIES

Moey posted:

I'm having zero issues with the Unity XT 480F units. We are only doing block via iSCSI, and probably got around 3x the space for the same price as Pure.

For the price, they aren't bad arrays. I managed 10 of them in my previous role, and the biggest complaint I had was EMC loving up serial numbers and site IDs. Once I got that fixed up, CloudIQ was really handy.

I can't remember which software release came out last year, but the advanced deduplication and compression improvements were nice too from what I remember.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

Langolas posted:

You do realize Powerstore block stack is brand new built from the ground up by XIO guys? That's why I'm keeping it at arms length because its not proven itself to me yet. Now Powerstore's file implementation definitely comes from the celerra/enas/unity code train. Hard pass on file type implementations on that product.

I have no doubt that there’s some new code in there but I’m going to bet that it’s mostly still a Frankenstein’s monster of existing IP. I remember when Unity was announced a “purpose-built all-flash array, designed from the ground up for the flash data center.” That sure wasn’t true.

qutius posted:

For the price, they aren't bad arrays. I managed 10 of them in my previous role, and the biggest complaint I had was EMC loving up serial numbers and site IDs. Once I got that fixed up, CloudIQ was really handy.

I can't remember which software release came out last year, but the advanced deduplication and compression improvements were nice too from what I remember.

For the most part you have to try pretty hard to buy a bad array. But if you have to install of work with a bunch of these products from different vendors you start to learn which ones are a little more well designed and polished. That extra polish may not be worth extra cost, which is also fine, each customer has their own set of drivers.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
I've been running Nimble hybrid arrays for like 8 years now, those things were amazing for what they were.

I agree, it's probably tough to find an enterprise class array that is a dumpster fire now a days.

abelwingnut
Dec 23, 2002


hopefully this is the right thread.

starting to think i should upgrade the hard drives in my 4-bay synology nas. would like to have each drive be at least 4tb, but am willing to go more if it's worth it. what are the best drives these days? i think most of these are wd reds, except for one i had to replace in an emergency.

SlowBloke
Aug 14, 2017

abelwingnut posted:

hopefully this is the right thread.

starting to think i should upgrade the hard drives in my 4-bay synology nas. would like to have each drive be at least 4tb, but am willing to go more if it's worth it. what are the best drives these days? i think most of these are wd reds, except for one i had to replace in an emergency.

If you go WD red check VERY accurately the part number, small sizes are now shingled(which means performance is poo poo). I have fitted my QNAP with seagate ironwolf pros and (knock on wood) they work fine.

abelwingnut
Dec 23, 2002


i'd be buying online, from amazon or newegg or someone reputable, so i'm not sure how i'd check the part number. is that the same as the model number? and what are small numbers? is there a thread somewhere about this?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





abelwingnut posted:

hopefully this is the right thread.

starting to think i should upgrade the hard drives in my 4-bay synology nas. would like to have each drive be at least 4tb, but am willing to go more if it's worth it. what are the best drives these days? i think most of these are wd reds, except for one i had to replace in an emergency.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2801557

abelwingnut
Dec 23, 2002


thanks.

lol internet.
Sep 4, 2007
the internet makes you stupid
Hmm, I seem too of started to lose a LUN on a cluster that's been up for like a year.

This is the error message. Any idea?

Cluster Shared Volume 'Volume1' has entered a paused state because of 'STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE(c000006d)'. All I/O will temporarily be queued until a path to the volume is reestablished.

Pikehead
Dec 3, 2006

Looking for WMDs, PM if you have A+ grade stuff
Fun Shoe
Does anyone have Pure storage and VMware Site Recovery Manager?

At work it takes (literal) hours for a failover, when I know on Hitachi G400/SRM it can take up to just 7 minutes to have the vm(s) up and running on the other side.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Pikehead posted:

Does anyone have Pure storage and VMware Site Recovery Manager?

At work it takes (literal) hours for a failover, when I know on Hitachi G400/SRM it can take up to just 7 minutes to have the vm(s) up and running on the other side.

Seen many people with it, call support. Something funky is going on and someone will have a look

Pikehead
Dec 3, 2006

Looking for WMDs, PM if you have A+ grade stuff
Fun Shoe

Vanilla posted:

Seen many people with it, call support. Something funky is going on and someone will have a look

Pure Support did end up getting involved. The word I got back is that Pure think they might know what the problem is, but it's lots of work to fix (at both ends). There's apparently something funky in our environment that works okay except when SRM tries to do it's thing.

Yeah, I know that's vague, but that's all I got back from the team involved.

Pikehead fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Oct 1, 2020

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

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

SRM is pretty lovely, so that’s not too surprising.

Langolas
Feb 12, 2011

My mustache makes me sexy, not the hat

SRM is pretty lovely

I've seen Vmware sit and point fingers at storage vendors on it when it was a re-scan issue from Vmware taking longer then expected and timeout values weren't tuned right from SRM

If Pure has a plan to address it, I would follow what they say before trusting anything Vmware says

Kaddish
Feb 7, 2002
I worked on a quote last year for a complete pie in the sky scenario to replace all of our IBM v7000's with new storage last year. I went with IBM again because I love SVC. (not that I needed to, I guess, but I do like Storwize)

My FlashSystem 5100 for prod and 5030 for DR were delivered, out of the blue, a couple of weeks ago.

I'm going all DRAID bitches!

Kaddish fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Mar 3, 2021

Kaddish
Feb 7, 2002

Langolas posted:

SRM is pretty lovely

I've seen Vmware sit and point fingers at storage vendors on it when it was a re-scan issue from Vmware taking longer then expected and timeout values weren't tuned right from SRM

If Pure has a plan to address it, I would follow what they say before trusting anything Vmware says


It's because SRM is dependent on storage vendor API usage and both VMware AND Pure are working with barely functioning code.

Edit - I love Pure storage, they are solid dudes with a solid product.

Kaddish fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Mar 3, 2021

Kaddish
Feb 7, 2002

lol internet. posted:

Hmm, I seem too of started to lose a LUN on a cluster that's been up for like a year.

This is the error message. Any idea?

Cluster Shared Volume 'Volume1' has entered a paused state because of 'STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE(c000006d)'. All I/O will temporarily be queued until a path to the volume is reestablished.

Did you resolve this? It sounds like a fabric/hardware layer issue.

If this is FC, and I assume it is, you might want to look at C3 discards on your target/initiator ports. A slow drain device could cause this, which is also the bane of my existence.

Kaddish fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 3, 2021

Pikehead
Dec 3, 2006

Looking for WMDs, PM if you have A+ grade stuff
Fun Shoe

Langolas posted:

SRM is pretty lovely

I've seen Vmware sit and point fingers at storage vendors on it when it was a re-scan issue from Vmware taking longer then expected and timeout values weren't tuned right from SRM

If Pure has a plan to address it, I would follow what they say before trusting anything Vmware says

More News:

I've kept out of this for a while but got to talking to the people who deal with this. Apparently my organisation uses very descriptive names for the luns at the Pure level and they went over some magical 40 character or so limit. This meant that every time SRM got used a full rescan was required and it took hours.

Options are:

1. Fix it somehow
2. Wait for tags

Tags are now apparently a thing in the latest SRA so once everyone lines everything up and tests it first and then put it into production, SRM will finally work the way it's supposed to.

Kaddish
Feb 7, 2002

Pikehead posted:

More News:

I've kept out of this for a while but got to talking to the people who deal with this. Apparently my organisation uses very descriptive names for the luns at the Pure level and they went over some magical 40 character or so limit. This meant that every time SRM got used a full rescan was required and it took hours.

Options are:

1. Fix it somehow
2. Wait for tags

Tags are now apparently a thing in the latest SRA so once everyone lines everything up and tests it first and then put it into production, SRM will finally work the way it's supposed to.

Um. Why do you have 40+ Pure LUNS is the pertinent question? I can't fathom a reason for this.

Like, you're trying to fix something that seems to be fundamentally broken, and fixing the fundamentals will help with whatever you're trying to do going forward.

Edit - I see, it's the LUN naming convention that is the problem, which gives me a headache even thinking about.

Pure LUNS are just a storage bucket, and unless you need specific compression/dedupe statistics per Pure LUN, they don't mean anything. And even if you need those stats, just create a 'test' LUN for compression/dedupe potential.

Or, there's always vvols (lol)

Kaddish fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Mar 4, 2021

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Kaddish posted:

I worked on a quote last year for a complete pie in the sky scenario to replace all of our IBM v7000's with new storage last year. I went with IBM again because I love SVC. (not that I needed to, I guess, but I do like Storwize)

My FlashSystem 5100 for prod and 5030 for DR were delivered, out of the blue, a couple of weeks ago.

I'm going all DRAID bitches!

I miss working with IBM storage, also doing FC fabrics. Don't get to work on that kinda stuff these days...

Edit: those IBM FC switches/MPRs that were just re-branded Brocade devices, so nice to work with!

Pile Of Garbage fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Mar 4, 2021

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


And in true IBM style, each port was licensed

Kaddish
Feb 7, 2002

Pile Of Garbage posted:

I miss working with IBM storage, also doing FC fabrics. Don't get to work on that kinda stuff these days...

Edit: those IBM FC switches/MPRs that were just re-branded Brocade devices, so nice to work with!

Ha, yep I still have some 8GB IBM switches at our DR location.

Edit - The new Storwize code has the option of setting up a storage array, including pools, mdisks, etc for SVC best practices, I tempted to try it. I'll need to recable/rezone my DR SVC cluster first to get NPIV working, though.

Kaddish fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Mar 4, 2021

Pikehead
Dec 3, 2006

Looking for WMDs, PM if you have A+ grade stuff
Fun Shoe

Kaddish posted:

Um. Why do you have 40+ Pure LUNS is the pertinent question? I can't fathom a reason for this.

Like, you're trying to fix something that seems to be fundamentally broken, and fixing the fundamentals will help with whatever you're trying to do going forward.

Edit - I see, it's the LUN naming convention that is the problem, which gives me a headache even thinking about.

Pure LUNS are just a storage bucket, and unless you need specific compression/dedupe statistics per Pure LUN, they don't mean anything. And even if you need those stats, just create a 'test' LUN for compression/dedupe potential.

Or, there's always vvols (lol)

Nothing to do with statistics at all - Decently sized managed service provider with multiple sites, each site having multiple vmware clusters. Additionally, there are customers that have dedicated luns (both SRM and non SRM) for various reasons, and there are also customers who directly use the storage arrays.

I looked at vVols and they'd be awesome except our backup solution doesn't allow for direct storage access as a transport mechanism on a vVol.

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Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Thanks Ants posted:

And in true IBM style, each port was licensed

Not just the ports, also the port types and features. Years ago I did a dual-site V7000 deployment with an FC fabric spanned between the sites using FCIP. Each site had two FC switches (SAN24B-4) and an MPR (SAN06B-R) so to deploy the solution we had to get the following licenses:

  • 4 x 8-port Upgrade Licenses (One for each switch, brings the number of usable ports per switch to 19).
  • 4 x Full Fabric Activation Licenses (One for each switch, lets you configure E_Ports to connect to the MPRs).
  • 2 x Advanced Extension (FTR_AE) Licenses (One for each MPR, lets you use FCIP)

IIRC for the four FC switches, two MPRs and all the licensing it was around $85k AUD which was over a quarter of the total BOM cost. poo poo those MPRs alone were like $30k AUD each.

Was a really fun build though!

Edit: hah I've still got the design/as-built I did for it, good times. A

Pile Of Garbage fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Mar 5, 2021

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