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Bluecobra
Sep 11, 2001

The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

quote:

So the real question is, can I cheap out and use the 7200.11/7200.12 drives for the X4540 without any issue? They're literally half the cost of the ES.2 disks. Also, I'm not worried about support since we've confirmed that issues not caused by third-party disks are still supported.

Why don't just use the same model drives that Sun uses? According to the Sun System Handbook the X4540 either uses 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330 disks or 1TB Seagate ST31000340NS disks. Though, I can't find anything that says you can or cannot mix disks in the X4500/X4540. I don't see why you couldn't though.

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lilbean
Oct 2, 2003

Bluecobra posted:

Why don't just use the same model drives that Sun uses? According to the Sun System Handbook the X4540 either uses 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330 disks or 1TB Seagate ST31000340NS disks. Though, I can't find anything that says you can or cannot mix disks in the X4500/X4540. I don't see why you couldn't though.
Those are the ES.2 disks, which are over twice the cost of the 7200.12 disks. The mix and match is fine, I'm just more worried about the consumer firmware-based drives causing issues.

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

lilbean posted:

So the real question is, can I cheap out and use the 7200.11/7200.12 drives for the X4540 without any issue? They're literally half the cost of the ES.2 disks. Also, I'm not worried about support since we've confirmed that issues not caused by third-party disks are still supported.
Those 7200 series drives probably won't support TLER/ERC, so that may be a problem. See if you can find a way to enable it.

Bluecobra
Sep 11, 2001

The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

lilbean posted:

Those are the ES.2 disks, which are over twice the cost of the 7200.12 disks. The mix and match is fine, I'm just more worried about the consumer firmware-based drives causing issues.
$159 for a 1TB enterprise-quality disk isn't that much money. Plus I'd be careful of using other disks unless you're sure that stuff like ZFS cache flushes work correctly.

lilbean
Oct 2, 2003

Bluecobra posted:

$159 for a 1TB enterprise-quality disk isn't that much money. Plus I'd be careful of using other disks unless you're sure that stuff like ZFS cache flushes work correctly.
That's pretty much what I'm asking, but I've used the non-ES.2 drives in our J4200s with no issue (on ZFS as well). Plus the ES.2 drives are literally twice the price as the non-enterprise ones.

Saukkis posted:

Those 7200 series drives probably won't support TLER/ERC, so that may be a problem. See if you can find a way to enable it.
I thought TLER was specific to Western Digital drives.

lilbean fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jun 29, 2009

H110Hawk
Dec 28, 2006

lilbean posted:

I thought TLER was specific to Western Digital drives.

TLER is just another name for how long the disk will keep telling the system it is trying again. It turns previous hard errors into soft ones. If the soft error goes past a certain time threshold, it becomes a hard one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

ZFS will certainly kick out more disks than typical using AS over NS Seagate disks. It's up to you to decide much of an impact that will have on your operation. For one vdev worth of disks it is likely worth trying.

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
this is probably a longshot... but is there any hope of a fishworks gateway? that is, the ability to run fishworks on some 1U nothing server and connect it to pre-existing san storage? I would *love* those reporting tools but already have a significant storage investment to work with.

Ernesto Diaz
Jun 16, 2003
sup chix
Well I just bit the bullet and purchased 2 HP DL380G6 servers and an EMC AX4 with 12 x 450GB hard drives. I was originally looking at an all HP setup with an EVA4400, but it was double the price of the AX4 and has some really strange requirements.

Can anyone who has worked with an AX4 ease my mind and tell me they're a good unit? I've spent a large chunk of my companies budget on this, and I really hope it doesnt come back to bite me on the rear end.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

Ernesto Diaz posted:

Well I just bit the bullet and purchased 2 HP DL380G6 servers and an EMC AX4 with 12 x 450GB hard drives. I was originally looking at an all HP setup with an EVA4400, but it was double the price of the AX4 and has some really strange requirements.

Can anyone who has worked with an AX4 ease my mind and tell me they're a good unit? I've spent a large chunk of my companies budget on this, and I really hope it doesnt come back to bite me on the rear end.

I'm biased, but it's a good array. The bottom end of the Clariion range.

Intraveinous
Oct 2, 2001

Legion of Rainy-Day Buddhists
Is there a site out there somewhere that has reviews and information on various enterprise storage products? I've done some googling around and found mostly reviews of consumer level products.

My next project to be piled on is to replace 9 small file servers that were originally deployed out in field offices. Because they were standalone, 5U Dell PE 2800 servers were purchased, and an LTO2 tape drive installed in each. About a year ago, it was determined that the network connections to these remote offices had been upgraded enough that the servers could be moved back to our central computer room. Now they're about to come off of maintenance, and the renewal cost is high enough that I think I should have no problem getting a NAS box to replace all 9 of them.

I'm looking at the HP DL185G5 or DL380G5 storage servers. Each of the 9 servers has only ~200GB of shared storage, so it shouldn't be any problem at all to put something together. I haven't really used Windows 2003 Storage server, how does it stack up for a NAS OS? I'm leaning toward it because the current 9 are all standard Windows boxes, so the changes in setup should be minimal.

Since most of the users have connections between 1.5Mbps and 5Mbps, I'm thinking I could probably get away with 7200RPM SATA or MDL SAS for the drives, so long as I give myself enough redundancy, thinking RAID6.

I've got a wide range of brands already, but we've been moving toward standardizing on HP for most of our x86 and storage stuff. That doesn't mean I wouldn't consider anything non-HP if they're still a tier 1 provider and have a good product at a good price.

I also just installed an EVA 4400, would I be smarter to buy a disk shelf and some FATA drives for it and then get a SAN gateway box or just set up another Windows File Server on VMware?

complex
Sep 16, 2003

Anyone well versed with EMC Symmetrix arrays? We have only a single admin, and he isn't very good...

Whenever he presents a LUN (or multiple LUNs to the same machine) it comes along with a 1MB LUN. He says this is required for the EMC and we should just ignore it, but I'm not so sure.

pre:
c2t5006048AD5F04751d0: configured with capacity of 0.94MB
c3t5006048AD5F0475Ed0: configured with capacity of 0.94MB


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 <LSILOGIC-LogicalVolume-3000 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 136>
          /pci@780/pci@0/pci@9/scsi@0/sd@0,0
       1. c2t5006048AD5F04751d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 1 alt 2 hd 15 sec 128>
          /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,qlc@0/fp@0,0/ssd@w5006048ad5f04751,0
       2. c3t5006048AD5F0475Ed0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 1 alt 2 hd 15 sec 128>
          /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,qlc@0,1/fp@0,0/ssd@w5006048ad5f0475e,0
There are two here because we're using multiple paths.

What is this 1MB LUN, and do we need it? If not, what can I tell our SAN admin in order to stop this madness?

Bluecobra
Sep 11, 2001

The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

complex posted:


There are two here because we're using multiple paths.

What is this 1MB LUN, and do we need it? If not, what can I tell our SAN admin in order to stop this madness?
I'm not sure why you have 1MB LUN's present, I did see a Sunsolve article saying this but I'm not sure if it's the same thing:

quote:

For Sun hosts connected to EMC Symmetrix Serial DMX storage, Sun engineer can inform customer that EMC engineer can request a modification of DMX Storage BIN file. Once EMC engineer agrees to help on this and the BIN file is modified, request a reconfigure reboot of the Solaris host. Then the Gatekeeper/VCM database Volumes (VCMDB) LUN related errors would disappear.

For EMC CLARiiON CX700 Array's presented special LUN, "LUNZ", get help from EMC engineer to Disable "arraycommpath" setting on CX700 array for each Solaris Server which can be done via command "navicli". Once EMC engineer completes the settings, initiate reboot of Solaris Operating System, and then the "LUNZ" LUN would disappear as well.
I would call Sun and see if they can help. Secondly, I'm not sure if you have multipathing working correctly. If you are using mpxio, you should only see one device. Make sure that in /kernel/drv/fp.conf that mpxio-disable is set to "no". If not then you should run "stmsboot -e" to enable multipathing. You may need to do a devfsadm -Cv after a reboot to clean up the old devices. More info here:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-1931

complex
Sep 16, 2003

A-ha, thanks. They seem to be "Gatekeeper LUNs", that provided the requisite Google juice. Now to convince the SAN guy that we don't need them.

As for the multipathing, yes, this was before i did stmsboot -e. It is a turn-up of a new box. Also, I trimmed the real disks, 4x500GB LUNs, from the output. After enabling multipathing:

pre:
bash-3.00# format
Searching for disks...done

c2t5006048AD5F04751d0: configured with capacity of 0.94MB
c3t5006048AD5F0475Ed0: configured with capacity of 0.94MB


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t0d0 <LSILOGIC-LogicalVolume-3000 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 16 sec 136>
          /pci@780/pci@0/pci@9/scsi@0/sd@0,0
       1. c2t5006048AD5F04751d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 1 alt 2 hd 15 sec 128>
          /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,qlc@0/fp@0,0/ssd@w5006048ad5f04751,0
       2. c3t5006048AD5F0475Ed0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 1 alt 2 hd 15 sec 128>
          /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@9/SUNW,qlc@0,1/fp@0,0/ssd@w5006048ad5f0475e,0
       3. c4t60060480000190300445533030383833d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 60 sec 272>
          /scsi_vhci/ssd@g60060480000190300445533030383833
       4. c4t60060480000190300445533030383635d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 60 sec 272>
          /scsi_vhci/ssd@g60060480000190300445533030383635
       5. c4t60060480000190300445533030383437d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 60 sec 272>
          /scsi_vhci/ssd@g60060480000190300445533030383437
       6. c4t60060480000190300445533030384131d0 <EMC-SYMMETRIX-5771 cyl 65533 alt 2 hd 60 sec 272>
          /scsi_vhci/ssd@g60060480000190300445533030384131

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Yeah, unless you're managing the symettrix from that box there's no reason to present a gatekeeper to it. If anything he's exposing your array to a variety of bad things if my understanding of the symettrix platform is correct.

That said I've only worked with one of them for about 2 months. I'd kill for a symapi/symettrix simulator that was worth a poo poo.

complex
Sep 16, 2003

I don't know if there is any harm in having them there. It's just annoying to sort through. I guess something bad could happen if we tried to write to one, or format it.

From the bit of reading I just did, it sounds like we want to not dedicate a gatekeeper device, so it will instead just use of the normal data LUNs for Symmetrix communication (which we of course will never do).

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Well you can manage the symettrix through the gatekeeper LUN, so the harm would potentially be that someone could use your server to make changes, etc.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th
Raise a support call with EMC, they'll identify what they are and will advise. I thought gatekeepers were typically 2880kb.

They're assigned per management host (anything with SOlutions Enabler). If you have say 2 hosts that can manage the Symm you would reserve 12 gatekeepers per host. Each of these should only be assigned one FA port and masked to one host HBA.



So in other news how about EMC acquiring Data Domain?

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Tragic in that datadomain was a neat product. Here's hoping EMC doesn't just shelve it into obscurity. Little surprise they paid so much for it.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

1000101 posted:

Tragic in that datadomain was a neat product. Here's hoping EMC doesn't just shelve it into obscurity. Little surprise they paid so much for it.

It's EMC that has the track record of good integration with its acquisitions. Netapp are the ones who drive almost everything into a wall!

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
DDUP made some neat products, but I don't get what all the fuss was about. From the benchmarks I've seen, Falconstor etc. have products that perform an entire order of magnitude better. Their corporate strategy that was never sure how it felt about post-process deduplication made me think the place was run by Scott McNealy.

paperchaseguy
Feb 21, 2002

THEY'RE GONNA SAY NO

complex posted:

Anyone well versed with EMC Symmetrix arrays? We have only a single admin, and he isn't very good...

Whenever he presents a LUN (or multiple LUNs to the same machine) it comes along with a 1MB LUN. He says this is required for the EMC and we should just ignore it, but I'm not so sure.

What is this 1MB LUN, and do we need it? If not, what can I tell our SAN admin in order to stop this madness?

It's probably the VCM device, and yes, this is perfectly normal for a Symm attached host.

edit: more info, the VCM device is a device that is presented to all paths with lun masking enabled. It contains lun masking information (the symmaskdb). If you don't have this on a FA port, your hosts attached to that port will see all devices. You don't "need" it from the host side, but you can safely ignore it.

paperchaseguy fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 27, 2009

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Vanilla posted:

It's EMC that has the track record of good integration with its acquisitions. Netapp are the ones who drive almost everything into a wall!

So long as it helps Clariion and Symettrix lines its going to work out. However, given that EMC seems to really like the idea of people buying shitloads of disk shelves, I doubt we'll see any inline data deduplication for production storage.

Hopefully EMC proves me wrong and makes the datadomain more than just a VTL offering bundled with Lagato.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

1000101 posted:

So long as it helps Clariion and Symettrix lines its going to work out. However, given that EMC seems to really like the idea of people buying shitloads of disk shelves, I doubt we'll see any inline data deduplication for production storage.

Hopefully EMC proves me wrong and makes the datadomain more than just a VTL offering bundled with Lagato.

Remember you still have to buy the deduplication nodes and technology. So whatever you don't buy in disk you buy in nodes and new technology. The savings arn't just around physical storage but the backend such as tapes. DDUP is target based deduplication, not source based - so it's all about back end, post process. The savings on tapes alone makes most dedup business cases pay off after 12 months.

It has already been announced that Data Domain will be its own full product division within EMC.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
While yes you do; depending on your application it will end up paying for itself in disks over the course of 2-3 years. I'm stalking strictly from a production storage standpoint. Of course, on the NetApp side of the house, de-duplication ends up being a zero cost option but I'd like to see other vendors with similar technology. Particularly for my very interested fibre channel customers who understand that EMC does FCP better than NetApp by a factor of like a billion or something and would rather jump in a bathtub filled with scorpions than buy a filer.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

1000101 posted:

While yes you do; depending on your application it will end up paying for itself in disks over the course of 2-3 years. I'm stalking strictly from a production storage standpoint. Of course, on the NetApp side of the house, de-duplication ends up being a zero cost option but I'd like to see other vendors with similar technology. Particularly for my very interested fibre channel customers who understand that EMC does FCP better than NetApp by a factor of like a billion or something and would rather jump in a bathtub filled with scorpions than buy a filer.

So with Celerra, the EMC NAS, there is already file based DeDuplication (at no extra charge). A combination of single instancing and compression.

This is different to Netapp who do block based dedup.

There are pros and cons to both. The EMC way is more granular and has less performance impact on production systems. The Netapp way can be used in both the NAS and SAN world and can be used on things like VMware.

EMC has a much stronger DeDuplication protfolio today (Avamar, Disk Library DeDuplication, Data Domain) but these items are cost items, unlike what you mention below about zero cost.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Vanilla posted:

So with Celerra, the EMC NAS, there is already file based DeDuplication (at no extra charge). A combination of single instancing and compression.

This is different to Netapp who do block based dedup.

There are pros and cons to both. The EMC way is more granular and has less performance impact on production systems. The Netapp way can be used in both the NAS and SAN world and can be used on things like VMware.

EMC has a much stronger DeDuplication protfolio today (Avamar, Disk Library DeDuplication, Data Domain) but these items are cost items, unlike what you mention below about zero cost.

I'd argue that depending on application, you might see zero performance impact from de-duplication. I've got a particular customer in mind who's virtualized several thousand webservers and keeps a couple hundred on a volume with ASIS. His overall storage footprint is <100GB for every 200 or so webservers. With a couple PAM modules he's actually performing better than if he wasn't using de-duplication.

Also keep in mind that while netapp is block level; it works very well on file level data. If you've got 400 copies of pain.jpg on your filer, you're only going to consume what one file does. The neat thing is if thats a frequently accessed block, then good odds its going to be sitting in cache on the box.

This is the sort of stuff thats going to start driving more units in people's datacenters. A lot of people are looking to cut costs wherever they can and if they can pay 50k in software to avoid adding a couple 30k shelves which consume space and power, then they're going to do it. This is the driving force behind every VMware engagement I've been on since the middle of last year. Spend more on software to avoid hardware costs and save datacenter space/power.

I want to see EMC break ground in this area with the CX4 line particularly; as I want an alternative in the event that NFS/iSCSI isn't going to be sufficient or they don't want to wait the duration it can sometimes take for a filer head to realize his partner poo poo himself. Since I'm not a reseller, I don't care what storage someone buys as long as they're happy with it and they aren't going broke trying to maintain it.

Keep in mind, I'm speaking in the context of online storage here, not nearline or backup devices. I think part of NetApp's plan was to try to leverage DD's de-dupe stuff on the fly and try to make it work with production storage.

However, if you deal primarily with DMX/V-MAX systems then your particular customers might not care about saving storage capacity whenever possible. My customers range from guys who think an AX4 is hot poo poo to someone who's got ~100 or so DMX4 systems so I have a much broader interest.

Boner Buffet
Feb 16, 2006
Has anyone noticed any price drops on Lefthand gear since HP swallowed them up; price drops that would enable a broke rear end school district to seriously consider going that route?

brent78
Jun 23, 2004

I killed your cat, you druggie bitch.

InferiorWang posted:

Has anyone noticed any price drops on Lefthand gear since HP swallowed them up;
Not really, expect to pay 30-35k per shelf.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

1000101 posted:

I'd argue that depending on application, you might see zero performance impact from de-duplication. I've got a particular customer in mind who's virtualized several thousand webservers and keeps a couple hundred on a volume with ASIS. His overall storage footprint is <100GB for every 200 or so webservers. With a couple PAM modules he's actually performing better than if he wasn't using de-duplication.

Also keep in mind that while netapp is block level; it works very well on file level data. If you've got 400 copies of pain.jpg on your filer, you're only going to consume what one file does. The neat thing is if thats a frequently accessed block, then good odds its going to be sitting in cache on the box.

This is the sort of stuff thats going to start driving more units in people's datacenters. A lot of people are looking to cut costs wherever they can and if they can pay 50k in software to avoid adding a couple 30k shelves which consume space and power, then they're going to do it. This is the driving force behind every VMware engagement I've been on since the middle of last year. Spend more on software to avoid hardware costs and save datacenter space/power.

I want to see EMC break ground in this area with the CX4 line particularly; as I want an alternative in the event that NFS/iSCSI isn't going to be sufficient or they don't want to wait the duration it can sometimes take for a filer head to realize his partner poo poo himself. Since I'm not a reseller, I don't care what storage someone buys as long as they're happy with it and they aren't going broke trying to maintain it.

Keep in mind, I'm speaking in the context of online storage here, not nearline or backup devices. I think part of NetApp's plan was to try to leverage DD's de-dupe stuff on the fly and try to make it work with production storage.

However, if you deal primarily with DMX/V-MAX systems then your particular customers might not care about saving storage capacity whenever possible. My customers range from guys who think an AX4 is hot poo poo to someone who's got ~100 or so DMX4 systems so I have a much broader interest.

I've found most people too scared to turn on DeDuplication in online production on anything other than unimportant volumes through simple fear of potentially affecting performance. That and the fact it has to be rehydrated before being backed up and backup durations are already growing too fast without another bottleneck.

At the moment the general attitude towards both EMC and Netapp's free deduplication is that it's a way of slowing the inevitable growth, but it's not really a revolution. They use it on their IT home directories and their own test LUNs but not on business units.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Vanilla posted:

I've found most people too scared to turn on DeDuplication in online production on anything other than unimportant volumes through simple fear of potentially affecting performance. That and the fact it has to be rehydrated before being backed up and backup durations are already growing too fast without another bottleneck.

At the moment the general attitude towards both EMC and Netapp's free deduplication is that it's a way of slowing the inevitable growth, but it's not really a revolution. They use it on their IT home directories and their own test LUNs but not on business units.

I think "most people" should really be qualified. As I've pointed out, I can think of a number of pretty sizable customers that are actively using de-duplication on revenue generating production systems. Depending on the application it can pretty much "solve" growth issues.

De-deduplication with virtualization is pretty much a home run in a LOT of cases. I would bet money that you're using products from companies that are doing just that right now.

Even still, people will find value in only buying say 1 or 2 disk shelves a year instead of 5 or 6 if de-duplication will just slow the growth.

Vanilla
Feb 24, 2002

Hay guys what's going on in th

1000101 posted:

I think "most people" should really be qualified. As I've pointed out, I can think of a number of pretty sizable customers that are actively using de-duplication on revenue generating production systems. Depending on the application it can pretty much "solve" growth issues.

De-deduplication with virtualization is pretty much a home run in a LOT of cases. I would bet money that you're using products from companies that are doing just that right now.

Even still, people will find value in only buying say 1 or 2 disk shelves a year instead of 5 or 6 if de-duplication will just slow the growth.

Not doing the big I-am but I spend all day talking to different customers, mostly in finance, about all aspects of virtualisation and storage in a pre-sales manner and honestly DeDup on production is still a hot pototato. A lot wont deploy it on production even though it is free - a simple code upgrade and you're ready.

We have a lot of guys who spend a lot of time tuning storage, who work out application IOPS requirements and then how this can go onto an array, the RAID overhead, dedicated spindles, etc. To add in a factor that can affect performance in a way you cant predict or calculate is just frightening to them at this stage.

It'll come along slowly, but in my opinion dedup on production is making a very slow entrance to the world and the only people i've seen use it in production are using it only on systems deemed unimportant. Usually this is to grab themselves another few weeks before they need another shelf, but not hugely reduce storage.

I've had one customer turn off Celerra DeDuplication because those above didn't like the idea of it and files were their life (law firm) and a Netapp customer turn it off becuase it can't be used with active snapshots and as a worldwide operation they couldn't find a time where they could allow the high CPU load and without a method of throttling CPU use it was deemed to risky.

As the products mature they will find answers to these issues and it will become more acceptable, but both the Netapp and EMC offerings are very much seen as GEN1.

Vanilla fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Jul 30, 2009

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Vanilla posted:

Not doing the big I-am but I spend all day talking to different customers, mostly in finance, about all aspects of virtualisation and storage in a pre-sales manner and honestly DeDup on production is still a hot pototato. A lot wont deploy it on production even though it is free - a simple code upgrade and you're ready.

We might be talking to a lot of the same sorts of people then. Some people look at it (especially in the virtualization space) and are genuinely excited about what its going to bring.

quote:

It'll come along slowly, but in my opinion dedup on production is making a very slow entrance to the world and the only people i've seen use it in production are using it only on systems deemed unimportant. Usually this is to grab themselves another few weeks before they need another shelf, but not hugely reduce storage.

I know of two pretty large customers who make 100% of their revenue from de-duplicated volumes.

I think NetApp's a little bit ahead of the curve in regards to where they are with their de-duplication technology.

Also consider things like single file flexclone as an option to "de-duplicate" on the fly. We're seeing pretty some pretty awesome results with RCU with an automation product integrated with VMware.

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I was hoping for sort of netapp sales engineer feedback but from one of you cuz yea SEs.

I have a web content management system that produces a lot of flatfiles as pre-rendered components of web pages, most of them containing php code then executed by the web front ends (all rhel/centos env). Its about 100GB of files with about 5.5 million files and directories (uuuggghhh). There's a live copy of the data (high traffic, distributed across 8 servers via rsync shenanigans), a staging copy of the data (low traffic), and over a dozen development copies of the data (very low traffic).

It seems to me that moving these all to nfs mounts on a de-dup'd volume would be pure nirvana. Am I reading that right?

Live currently has the spindles to push about 1200 IOPS, I have no idea what that would translate to in nfs ops. Whats the lowest end netapp with the least amount of storage I could get away with? Ideally they would still support asynchronus-but-near-realtime (aka not a 5min cron job) replication of the live filesystem.

I've got a quote for a pair of FAS2020's with 15x300GB@10k, and I and I would really like to get the price down like 30+%. Its from CDW so I could probably start with VAR shopping, but can I whittle hardware?

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Honestly, the CPU in the 2020 is a little anemic; that said you can probably see some pretty good benefits. How frequently do those files get read? Are you actually performing 1200 IOPS or do you just have enough capacity to do it?

How far away is the replication target going to be? What connectivity? You might even get synchronous depending on how much data actually changes.

As far as VAR shopping, you can probably get a little bit more off the top since they're going to hope that you'll keep using them for other poo poo.

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

1000101 posted:

Honestly, the CPU in the 2020 is a little anemic; that said you can probably see some pretty good benefits. How frequently do those files get read? Are you actually performing 1200 IOPS or do you just have enough capacity to do it?

How far away is the replication target going to be? What connectivity? You might even get synchronous depending on how much data actually changes.

As far as VAR shopping, you can probably get a little bit more off the top since they're going to hope that you'll keep using them for other poo poo.
thanks

they tend to putter around at 40 - 80 iops each (so x8) most days. when you say the cpu is anemic, what would that mean? de-dup would cause lags? someone running a find might hose everything else at once? Certainly the 15 10k spindles could keep up and then some (btw, no half-shelf options or anything?)

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
That sounds like it should be fine then.

There is some CPU overhead from putting things back together and there isn't a hell of a lot of cache in the box. The biggest hit to the CPU typically comes around when it checks the blocks to de-dup them.

I don't think anyone offers half shelf options on the 2020 but they might on the 2050.

'find' won't be too expensive since its just going to do a bunch of inode lookups. Opening all of them at once could make certain disk blocks get hammered to hell (it should go up to read cache at that point unless you've got a shitload of writes going in)

Are you buying SnapMirror too?

StabbinHobo
Oct 18, 2002

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
not sure, this is an old quote that we had decided against but since the alternative has gone nowhere for four months I'm looking to bring it back up. Is SnapMirror their brand-phrase for replication?

the two sites are about 70 miles apart and would have a 100mbps ethernet link between them.

would the 2050 with half a shelf cost less than a 2020 with a whole shelf?
edit: come to think of it, i want 12 spindles worth of iops anyway, so I suppose its moot.

StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jul 31, 2009

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
2050 is nice since you can also expand the heads with a PCI card and of course its got a little more growth room.

SnapMirror is the NetApp product thats used to replicate data from one site to the next. It's pretty simple to setup and its WAAS/WAN acceleration friendly. It can be kicked off as frequently as you like so long as there is enough bandwidth to copy the changes over to the other site.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
I just moved part of my ESXi development environments off of local storage and onto a 48TB Sun x4500 I had lying around, shared via ZFS+NFS on OpenSolaris 2009.06 over a 10GbE link.

I was worried about performance because it's SATA disk, but holy poo poo this thing screams with all those disks. I have never seen a Linux distro install so fast ever in my life. The bottleneck seems to be the 10GbE interface, which apparently maxes out around 6 gig.

If I can find some sane way to replicate this to another Thumper, I will be a very, very happy man.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Aug 6, 2009

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Bluecobra
Sep 11, 2001

The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Misogynist posted:

I just moved part of my ESXi development environments off of local storage and onto a 48TB Sun x4500 I had lying around, shared via ZFS+NFS on OpenSolaris 2009.06 over a 10GbE link.

I was worried about performance because it's SATA disk, but holy poo poo this thing screams with all those disks. I have never seen a Linux distro install so fast ever in my life. The bottleneck seems to be the 10GbE interface, which apparently maxes out around 6 gig.

If I can find some sane way to replicate this to another Thumper, I will be a very, very happy man.
Are you using these 10GbE cards? They have been working extremely well for us but on some servers we added another card and turned on link aggregation. There is also this new feature in Solaris 10 Update 7 that may or may not be in OpenSolaris:

quote:

Large Segment Offload Support for Intel PCI Express 10Gb NIC Driver

This feature introduces Large Segment Offload (LSO) support for the ixgbe driver and some ixgbe driver bug fixes. LSO is an important feature for NIC, especially for 10-Gb NIC. LSO can offload the segmentation job on Layer 4 to the NIC driver. LSO improves transmit performance by decreasing CPU overhead. This feature is enabled by default.

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