Catch 22 posted:

How does a SAN fail? I mean, I can see by SpoonDaddys way of failing, but has anyone had a SAN truly fail? And I don't mean you ignored it after it had multiple hardware failures. I mean, everything is working and BAM, SAN dead.

Catch 22 posted:

I would say so. Wow, was this a firmware bug?

rage-saq posted:

EMC actually came out onsite and did some performance monitoring to determine IOPS usage patterns before you gave them any money?

I've not actually heard of them doing this, just coming up with random guesstimates for customers based off a little input from the customer. They were horribly wrong (short by about 40% in some cases) that I ended up fixing their order at the last minute before they placed their order (but sometimes after and having to fix it by buying more disks).

H110Hawk posted:

I would chalk it up to power, but this is at three different datacenter locations, with three different power feeds, one of which is many miles away. We've also had countless webservers and stuff just arbitrarily falling over. Has anyone else been having a "when it rains it pours" week with really random errors?

At this point I'm blaming bogons and the LHC.

Mierdaan posted:

With the FAS2020, do we need to pay for the CIFS and NFS software licenses if we only intend to use it as an iSCSI target initially? Understandably we'd lose the NAS functionality, but we can add it back in later.

We have a PC Mall sales engineer claiming we need at least CIFS to allow Windows-based hosts to use the FAS as an iSCSI target, which just seems odd to me.

edit: nevermind, I asked him the question again via email and he recanted. Huzzah!

Cultural Imperial posted:

Q. Do I need a CIFS license on the storage system to run SnapDrive?
A. No. SnapDrive no longer requires a CIFS share for the host to access the storage system volumes.

Wicaeed posted:

I figure it probably wouldn't be worth my time/money to buy a license from Netapp, am I right?

Vanilla posted:

I've never been a fan of the replication of snapshots in the Netapp sense because, in the example of Exchange, ESEutil is not run at the time each Snap is taken.

Wicaeed posted:

Can anyone with a Netapp Now subscription tell me if the ONTAP 6.5.1R1 is installable on a FAS720? I'm reading the documentation that came with my ONTAP release CD, and it says there should be a folder called Alpha for the F700 series filers under CD-Drive:\ONTAP\6_5_1R1, however my CD only has folders X86 and MIPS. Do I have a "special" cd or am I missing a folder?

InferiorWang posted:

I hate sales people. I want to get pricing on some lefthand gear, but I don't want to listen to any of their spiel, or get follow up calls only to have the person get pissy when I remind them we're a public school and everything comes down to dollars, not necessarily doing things the proper way. I don't want to talk to a reseller either. All I want to know is how much it costs.

Are there any resources available which might have this information available without having to talk to someone or does it pretty much come down to having to put up with sales people?

InferiorWang posted:

Thanks fellas. What I'd really like to do is have an iSCSI SAN, 2-4 TB. I'd like to host a modest amount of vmware guests on it hosting primarily file shares, home directories, and groupwise email for the staff numbering 250-300. Then I'd like to do it all over again with a completely redundant SAN at one of our other schools in some sort of fail over configuration. Being able to do snapshots and have some sort of monitoring dashboard is something I'd like as well.

My problem is I can't even get anyone to listen to me about doing this and getting away from bare metal machines for our critical data without having some semblance of a dollar figure attached to it. I have to approach this rear end backwards from how most normal people would approach it.

EscapeHere posted:

Are there any knowledgeable goons here that would care to comment on an HDS AMS 2500 vs an IBM DS5300? We're looking at around 100Tb with a mix of FC/SAS and SATA drives, but will need to expand that to +200Tb over the next couple of years. HDS are claiming their new internal SAS architecture is all the rage; IBM are basically saying HDS are full of poo poo and their stuff is way cooler. The IBM kit is about 10-15% more expensive but supposedly faster, so they tell me. On the other hand, we've been previously using HDS for many years and had no major problems, it's all worked very well and their support has been excellent. While we have plenty of IBM servers we have never used or bought anything from their storage range.

For this project the "fast" drives (FC or SATA) would be used for VMWare for Exchange, AD, etc while the SATA disks would be used for archiving of medical records. Can anyone give any advice or reasons why it might be worth (or not) spending the extra $s on the IBM?

Got KarmA? posted:

I'm not sure any kind storage level replication technology will net you anything better than crash-equivalent data.

Misogynist posted:

This is a long shot, but what the hell, lemme run it by you guys.

I've got a pair of Brocade 300 switches (rebranded as IBM SAN24B-4), and I'm trying to connect up each switch's Ethernet management port to a separate Cisco Nexus fabric. Each one is run with a 5020, and the switches link up to a 2048T FEX. Problem is, whenever I do this, there is no link. I can hook up the 300 to a laptop and get a link. I can hook up the 300s to each other and get a link on both. I can hook it up to some old-rear end Cisco 100-megabit 16-port switch and get a link. I can hook up other devices, like an IBM SAN and a Raritan KVM, and get links. But for some reason, the goddamn things just will not show a link when I hook them up to the gigabit ports on the 2048T.

Any ideas? The only thing I can think is that the Nexus has issues with stuff below 1 gigabit, but if that's the case, that's some of the most braindead poo poo I've ever heard.

TobyObi posted:

Oracle aren't going to drop OpenSolaris and ZFS.

A large part of the purchase was the 7000 series, which are these software components behind pretty clicky buttons.

Whether OpenSolaris remains actually "open" is another question though.

As for btrfs, with the main driver of this being Oracle for Oracle Unbreakable Linux, they may drop a lot of the development push behind it and work on rolling it into ZFS.

Cultural Imperial posted:

Is anyone out there looking at 10GbE?

oblomov posted:

Well, you would have multiple 10GB links per server so you should still have MPIO. Here is the thing. Look at switch/datacenter/cabling costs, and 10GB starts making sense. Our 2U VMware servers each used to have 8 cables (including Dell drac) and now we have 3. It's similar with our NFS/iSCSI storage. You would be surprised how much cabling, patch panels and all that stuff costs and how much pain in the rear it takes to run say 100 cables from a blade enclosure.

We are going all 10GB for new VMware and storage infrastructure, and cost analysis makes sense.

FISHMANPET posted:

Open ended question, but how do you guys backup large Unix volumes? Right now we're limited to 25 GB Partitions because that's the biggest partition AMANDA can handle within our artificial constraints (level 0 every 14 days, LTO2 tape). Faculty has started rumbling, and our solution is to ??? We've managed to do 50GB Partitions with LTO4 (though I imagine those could be bigger) but I think even that's too small, especially when a few professors have used their grants to buy Terabytes of contiguous storage at once, only to have it split up into tiny useless morsels.

We've started using Bakbone with 500GB partitions, but I really hate Bakbone and would really much rather use AMANDA because it deals with all the stupid bullshit way better than Bakbone does.

Jadus posted:

I'm curious what the general thought is when warranty expires on a SAN.

Lets say my company completely invests in a P2V conversion, purchasing a SAN with a 5 year warranty. After that 5 years are up, the SAN itself may be running perfectly, but the risk of having something like a controller or power supply fail and then wait multiple business days for a replacement is pretty high.

I can't image it's typical to replace a multi-TB SAN every 5 years, and warranty extensions only last so long.

I suppose after that 5 years it may be a good idea to purchase a new SAN and mirror the existing, for a fully redundant infrastructure, and then only make replacements on major failures.

What is normally done in this situation?

oblomov posted:

Wow, I would love to see where you are getting that pricing. Shelf of 24 x 600GB 10K SAS drive is retailed at $80K plus, and 2TB SATA at about same. Then you throw in 3 year support and it's almost another 20% on top. Now, nobody is paying retail, but still, you are getting a very very good deal if you are paying $30K for that.

It's even more ridiculous pricing for full 3140HA with all licensing and 10TB SAS plus 10TB SATA. Now, NetApp is going to be discounting now since new hardware is coming out soon, but still.....

You are talking Equallogic pricing here, and while I like Equallogic, let's face it, nobody would be buying it if NetApp was priced same.

Intrepid00 posted:

conntrack posted:

i guess you did the "company down and nobody working" calculation and it didn't bite? i feel you pain.

quackquackquack posted:

It's "my first SAN" time at work!

We have 4 shiny ESXi hosts and a vSphere Enterprise Plus license. I should note I play much more with the Windows side, rarely the linux.

We're currently running roughly 60% linux VMs, with a couple of them actually requiring decent resources. All of the Windows VMs are pretty light - print, DC, tiny SCCM, light file, etc. In the past, the linux servers have mounted NFS shares, and the Windows file servers have pointed at iSCSI.

For storage options, we're somewhat locked into IBM nSeries (rebadged NetApp), and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in terms of licensing protocols. My thought was to license only NFS, and store the vmdks on NFS. Save money by not paying for iSCSI (have to double check with the vendor that this is true).

Is there any reason to expose NFS or iSCSI directly to VMs, as opposed to making NFS/iSCSI datastores in ESXi?

I'm not sure why I would want to use CIFS. Would it be to get rid of our Windows file servers?

Dreadite posted:

This is good advice. Something I noticed was that this particular vendor quoted 11k for the actual hardware and 3600 dollars for what appears to be "racking and stacking" the server in our noc. Needless to say, that's outrageous, but this is my first time buying a piece of hardware in this way. Is that to be expected with all vendors, or can I find someone who will just send me my hardware?

Edit: I'm actually waiting on a quote from another couple of vendors for some EMC equipment and an HP Lefthand setup, I'll probably report back with those prices too so I can get a feel if the prices are fair.

three posted:

We do scheduled Snapshots + SAN Replication.

Shaocaholica posted:

Curious how different implementations of the 'cp' command works when copying from one network location to another. Do the bits actually have to go through the machine running the command? Are there any common or budget implementations where they do not?

Internet Explorer posted:

Yes, sorry. Having a bit of a brain fart. I could have sworn there was a way to do it with a VMDK. I think VMFS is pretty resilient. I have used snapshots for test labs a lot and never ran into any problems, even Exchange or SQL.

FISHMANPET posted:

So from my understanding, Microsoft's DFS can be used to abstract the actual storage to the servers. If I want to replace a storage server, I can throw it in and set DFS to replicate to it, and when I want remove the old server.

So first, is that a correct assumption? And second, does anything like that exist for NFS? It looks like NFS v4.1 does this, is that right?

Less Fat Luke posted:

So since we're talking about 10GE does anyone have switch suggestions? My current setup is using a Cisco 4900M. It's totally solid, 8+8+8 fiber ports (with X2 modules). However it's very expensive and I was wondering what other people have been using.

Xenomorph posted:

I guess I don't fully understand iSCSI.

I've looked at a few NAS servers that advertise "Built-in iSCSI Target Service". It then mentions that it runs Linux and uses EXT4 for its file system.

How does that work if a Windows system is the iSCSI initiator? I thought I could just connect the device and then a drive would show up to Windows that I could then format as NTFS.

Syano posted:

I am still trying to wrap my head around what Microsoft's strategy is with Server 2012 and SMB 3.0 and scale out file servers for applications. Everything starts out looking awesome. Storing SQL and Exchange databases on your file servers is a pretty neat option. Having your hyper-v stores on an SMB share is pretty awesome too. So you move from that to thinking high availability at the file server level and you start reading about scale-out file servers. At this point things start looking fantastic. Unified storage for my MS shop on an active-active file server cluster. Then it hits you... you still have to have shared storage for all this to work.

So is Microsoft's strategy for all of this for me to build this out with the file server cluster acting as the filer and all the back-end storage still being done via 3rd party iscsi or fiberchannel kits? Or heck by shared SAS shelfs? And if that is the strategy why would I not just avoid the middle man and connect my hyper-v, sql and exchange application services directly to the iSCSI targets? I think I am missing something here.

Syano posted:

Maybe this is just a natural progression of things... ie Microsoft puts out Server 2012 with SMB 3.0 support and the idea is that 3rd parties ala netapp/emc/etc pick up and implement SMB 3.0 support soon and thats their idea of the end to end solution.

parid posted:

Has anyone bit the bullet on clustered-ontap yet? I just put our first cluster into production last weekend and I wouldn't describe it as "smooth sailing".

NippleFloss posted:

- If you're holding out for an in place upgrade option then you may have a long wait. PM me about this if you have questions.

Erwin posted:

Yeah, it's awful.