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sanchez posted:Seeing a lot of positive equalogic feedback in this thread, on the low end, has anyone had experience with the PS4100 series? I need to get a demo from them but what I've read so far sounds pretty good when compared with netapp at a similar price level. Apologies as I know I'm stating the obvious, but keep in mind that if you're comparing Netapp to EQL you're not comparing like with like. EQL is iSCSI only (they do a NAS head but if you buy just a PS4100 you just get iSCSI) whilst a Netapp will be block and file. EQL give you all licenses, Netapp may or may not depending on the model you're looking at. When we did our last SAN refresh EQL weren't the right fit for us, neither were Netapp, but when the Netapp quote came, the software licenses were more than the hardware, which was pretty scary.
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Dec 18, 2011 11:11
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:21 |
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We've had a HP P4000 for the last year or so. I have mixed feelings about it. It's cool that an entire server room can lose power and the SAN keeps on running. It's not cool that it happened to us, but the power cut was an exceptional length, but the SAN kept running. Downsides are that their update process scares me - not so much the process but the way that it still sends you all the "your SAN is hosed" alerts that you'd get if you just pulled the plug on nodes, rather than having a "I'm doing an upgrade, I won't scare you" mode. Also HP support. 'nuff said. L2 are good once you get through to them.
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Dec 18, 2011 11:15
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Mausi posted:This is true for all the enterprise vendors, NetApp are just honest about it (so are compellent iirc). It's more the "surprise" factor that I'm wary of tbh. How big a part that plays may come down to the salespeople but I'd be wary of buying a SAN from any vendor and getting a great discount and then six months later I have a need to do SQL snapshots or replication or something. Then the fuckers bend you over. No such thing as a free lunch and yes you pay for it either way, but it's why I like the EQL and P4000 model of getting all the licenses in the purchase price. Compellent will be interesting when we have our next refresh. When I last looked at them their product looked fantastic, but it was about 3 months before Dell took them over and they just didn't seem to want to compete on price.
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Dec 18, 2011 11:44
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30tb of Netapp with all licenses and support for €15k Where do I sign-up?  Tbh, from what ehzorg has said I'm struggling to see the push for NAS or any kind of shared storage vs. something simple and centralised like a big old server full of disks? A NAS or SAN, yep great if you need multi-protocol or shared access, but from his post it comes across as doing anything will be a struggle so it seems a bit of a jump going from USB HDD's on peoples desks to a full blown NAS/unified storage when nobody has really mentioned the options in between. I suspect you'd get change from €10k for a Dell R510 stuffed full of 3tb 3.5" MDL SAS drives.
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Dec 18, 2011 17:09
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szlevi posted:Two things: redundancy and scalability. 30TB which scales up to 100TB and can maintain storage bandwidth while, say, recovering RAID6 from a double-disk failure? Third thing: limited budget If he can get something that size out of Dell, or anyone, then sure, it's going to be a better long term bet than an R510. It's being made to sound like money is a big issue though, and once you factor in current HDD prices + backing it all up as well, I think it's going to be a heck of a squeeze on $$$ I would say to ehzorg that whatever you do, do not cut corners on backup. Centralised storage also means centralised data loss - in a perverse way you at least have some redundancy through all those individual HDD's you have kicking around. Drop it all on <anything> and sure, you have redundancy but if you should suffer some logical or physical issue you've also just lot the whole lot or a big chunk of it.
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Dec 18, 2011 20:23
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Cavepimp posted:Well it's too late for me to change my mind now anyway since there was very much an "end of the year tax considerations" component to getting the purchase signed off on. It's a nice box by all accounts. It does seem to have some quirks that I've read of, but I think some of that comes down to if you've never used a SAN vs. if you have so have certain expectations. Things I can think of off the top of my head that I've read, no idea how valid but.. Management can only be done from the same subnet as the storage controllers 2tb limit on block volumes Dedupe only works on CIFS/NFS and not on block storage RAID is preconfigured depending on what "disk pack" you add For most SMB's those likely aren't issues.
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Dec 20, 2011 18:31
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Any of you P4000 folks updated to the current patch baseline for SAN/iQ 9.0? I don't want to pull the trigger on 9.5 yet, but our 9.0 hasn't been patched for six months or so.
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Dec 27, 2011 18:10
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Personally I'm becoming more and more convinced that scale-out/node/grid based storage is the way it's headed. Just my opinion but I look around at most of the chassis based solutions and unless you've got a big budget I don't see the value there that you get with node based solutions, especially when you want to factor in some redundancy.
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Dec 27, 2011 23:47
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Martytoof posted:This may be a terrible question to ask among people who discuss actual SAN hardware, but if I want to get my feet wet with iSCSI ESXi datastores, what would be the best way to go about this on a whitebox as far as the operating system is concerned. I'm looking at something like OpenFiler. This would literally just be a small proof of concept test so I'm not terribly concerned about ongoing performance right now. Download the Lefthand P4000 VSA and install it on a vSphere or Hyper-V host.
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Jan 7, 2012 16:18
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Beelzebubba9 posted:What I'm interested in is what are the best practices for improving the reliability of a SAN beyond the obvious methods (hot spare, server class hardware, backing up critical data off the SAN). Something is always your weak link whether it's your backplane, your motherboard, your PSU, your single RAID controller, or the room itself, so it's about minimizing those risks that you think you're most at risk from. I'd be looking at something like the P4000 VSA that is a "proper" storage appliance and that does replication between systems, that way if your whitebox is cheap enough you just buy two and replicate everything.
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Jan 9, 2012 20:27
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So, let's say you have 24x2tb Nearline SAS spindles in a pair of MD1200 cabinets and you need as many random read IOPS out of them as you can without sacrificing down to RAID10 levels. What config would you go with? This is for Commvault if anyone if familiar with it. Thanks.
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Jan 12, 2012 20:01
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Spamtron7000 posted:Why would you need to maximize random reads IOPS for CommVault? Are you using CommVault's dedupe agent? Unless you are I would guess the backup data is more sequential. We're aux copying dedupe data to tape so it's rather random as it's rehydrating it.
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Jan 12, 2012 22:19
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Spamtron7000 posted:Got it. I think you have to choose speed vs. capacity. RAID10 vs RAID5. I think it's likely to be multiple RAID5 sets right now (that's what their building blocks white paper suggests) with enough mount paths that hopefully you get lots/all of the spindles working for us at the same time. As for the dedupe, I like it. We've got around 100tb of backup data stored in around 8.5tb of physical disk right now. I've not tried variable block length or global dedupe, but there's a reason for that, which is that our current MA was never purchased with D2D or dedupe in mind. We got a very good deal on dedupe so went with it, but had to make do with our current server. With the new server my (rough) plan is to use global dedupe, not sure about variable block length, I need to look into that. Have you read their building blocks white paper? It's very useful IMO. As for Commvault vs. DD/Exagrid, never used either but I know the discount we get on Commvault, I know the (rough) lists on DataDomain and I don't see how it's even close tbh?
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Jan 13, 2012 11:21
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Thank you for those. Yeah, I think the way it's looking it will be multiple smaller RAID sets, idea being that Commvault likes to read and write data to lots of drives simultaneously. I need to do a shitload of testing with IOMeter I guess but my gut reaction given the physical cabinet layouts is that 2x 5+1 RAID5's per cabinet should see me good. Bitch Stewie fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Jan 13, 2012 |
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Jan 13, 2012 19:09
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Martytoof posted:Is Nexenta somehow optimized for SAN duty in some way that Solaris isn't? I guess what I'm asking is, other than the GUI and prepackaged tools is there any advantage to running Nexenta over stock Solaris for an iSCSI target. You know in principle I love Nexenta. I don't know why but I'm just wary about thinking about using it in production. I'd be interested to hear some reasons why I'm being irrational. (I specifically mean Nexenta, not the whole ZFS/dedupe/Oracle 7000 family type of unified storage).
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Jan 24, 2012 15:40
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Do any of you do SAN snapshots and replication of VMFS? Ever encountered any issues when you mount up a snapshot at a remote site?
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Feb 2, 2012 20:26
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evil_bunnY posted:Those two would have plugins to make the DBMS snap-aware though. Exchange does, we run SQL on VMDKs though so that doesn't. To put it in context, we do proper backups, but I'm just in the process of setting up a server that will hold replicas from our primary SAN that will go at the other side of our campus - essentially it's a "I'm in deep loving poo poo and need something to get the business out of the ashes before the box of tapes gets brought up from 150 miles away" box.
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Feb 2, 2012 22:12
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Internet Explorer posted:There should be a plugin you can use that will give you a proper snapshot of SQL. I forget the term they use, but I think a coalesce snapshot? It basically puts the database in backup mode for a second, then takes the snapshot, usually using something like VSS. Quiesced? The SAN vendor makes one, but it only works if the DB/log volumes are hosted directly on the SAN, it won't work if they are VMDKs. Tbh, crash consistent VM backups would be just fine in the scenario this box is there to aid in, my main concern is how prone VMFS is to screwing up if you just snapshot it and then try and mount it.
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Feb 2, 2012 22:23
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NippleFloss posted:As long as you aren't using extents you should be fine. If you have a single vmfs filesystem spanning multiple luns and you can't put the luns in a consistency group for the snapshot then you could have issues. Oh gently caress that sounds nasty!!
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Feb 3, 2012 19:52
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Martytoof posted:OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Nexenta, OI + napp-it. Am I missing any other "free" SAN implementations that I could be trying out? OpenDedup perhaps - new but looks very interesting.
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Feb 3, 2012 19:53
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evil_bunnY posted:That would be like a pair of controllers going down on a traditional SAN, though. No, but it's something that would concern me, plan for the worst and all that. I guess there's an argument in a frame based SAN that you could lose power to a shelf or similar, but something just doesn't sit so well with the idea that if you have 5 EQLs and any one of them goes offline there goes all of your LUNs that have so much as a block on the offline unit. It's irrational I accept, but the concern is there.
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Feb 5, 2012 10:43
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FISHMANPET posted:I'm trying to figure out a list of SAN vendors to look at. As Syano said, it's a bit like simply asking "what car should I look at?" without knowing if you want 7 seats and have fat kids or you want a sports coupe...
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Feb 14, 2012 22:09
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Oddhair posted:My boss just walked up and said we want to spend ~$20K-30K on a pair of servers and possibly some shared storage...by Thursday. I haven't run perfmon on the current servers in question (and was actually spinning up some logged performance stats earlier today) so I'm not sure where to start. I've been pushing to virtualize for a while, since our SQL server is a single socket, and our voicemail server is a dual PIII, so off the cuff we're a good candidate for server consolidation. Is there a way to get decent quotes with almost no information up front? Well first thing is first: How much data? What type of data? How much growth? IOPS requirements? Replication/DR requirements? And today is Tuesday, what is so special about Thursday that means he can risk loving it up by rushing in?
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Feb 28, 2012 21:51
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So who does unified (NFS and iSCSI at a minimum) with synchronous replication i.e. P4000 but with NFS? Pipe dream? 
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Mar 22, 2012 18:17
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NippleFloss posted:Synchronous over what distance? And what is your RPO on the synchronous data? NetApp has a synchronous flavor of Snapmirror but it's obviously got some latency restrictions that you must be able to meet between the two sites for it to work. It gives you an RPO of within a few seconds, so it's not truly synchronous, though it is close enough to work for most applications. We have fibre on-site, distance would be around a mile, maybe a little less. P4000 is true synchronous and what we have now, it just doesn't do NFS (which we don't need but would be nice to have for VMware).
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Mar 22, 2012 18:58
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With our P4000 we have a quorum "failover manager" at a third location - the SAN acts as a cluster so the links are redundant but if a site disappears the quorum manager gives quorum to the remaining site. I've not really started looking yet as the replacement's some time off, but I'd assumed all the alternatives would work in a similar manner. It's the only problem with the P4000 - it's cheap to the point where whilst it's just iSCSI, nothing else seems to come close at the price in redundancy terms.
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Mar 22, 2012 19:31
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Nomex posted:Netapp does. Price will be the kicker. I was reading the link provider by NippleFloss and from the pricing I had on Netapp when we were looking prior to our current P4000 it's just way too expensive for us to justify. There are things I hate about our P4000 (mostly every time I have to deal with HP) but when you get down to the nitty gritty of being able to buy $6k's worth of SAN licenses, a pair of $2k servers (and of course switches and the trivial matter of fibre between locations), et voila you can have a storage cluster across two sites for $10k, bottom line is nothing's going to come close is it, I don't even know why I keep looking.
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Mar 22, 2012 21:09
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Nomex posted:If you can automatically fail over your primary site using HP then there's no reason to switch. If you have to manually intervene to bring up your DR site, then the cost of that downtime might make the savings on the storage seem trivial. We can - it's pretty cool in that I can power down all the storage nodes (either intentionally or the time we had an extended power outage) in one of our computer rooms and nothing even notices. For us, sure I'd love to look at NFS, and Netapp make some cool software features (other probably do but they're the only vendor I really looked at that offers a software "suite") but bottom line is they're not things we could ever sell to the business, they'd make our lives a little more interesting as IT, but more at a geek level than anything sellable.
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Mar 22, 2012 21:17
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Internet Explorer posted:Sounds like a pretty sweet setup. Don't mess with it. NFS is cool but not worth compromising what you have. It is tbh. Right now we use the hardware nodes but we got an insane deal (around $23k) on a P4500 "Virtualisation Bundle" which also gives us 100tb of VSA licenses. When the lease comes up on the hardware I'm interested in buying it out and extending the support, and buying several 1U or 2U boxes, stuffing them full of drives and basically using the VSA's (fully supported on the VMware/Hyper-V HCL) on top of those servers. Up to 10 nodes/100tb of fully supported replicated highly available storage on HP/Dell commodity hardware, sounds great in theory, what could possibly go wrong....
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Mar 22, 2012 22:11
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That does look interesting, but I can't help but think there will be some limitations that will prevent use as a primary SAN unless you're in quite a small environment. Presumably you'll still be having to license the add-on software, it won't be an "all-in" model?
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Mar 23, 2012 17:51
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True, but with my very limited dealings with Netapp the software add-ons were loving expensive - more than the hardware IIRC (which I might not). It seems a bit counter-intuitive to skew this even more, but I'm assuming a Netapp VSA would be significantly cheaper than a hardware Netapp, it may not be I guess.
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Mar 23, 2012 18:13
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I've read several times that Equallogic aren't #1 in iSCSI because they do everything better than everyone else, they're #1 because it's all-inclusive so you know exactly what you're getting.
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Apr 5, 2012 19:11
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I'd love some ballpark numbers on some typical V7000 configs. We have a refresh some time off so it's not work speaking to anyone just yet but I'm working the mental shopping list of who to look at. What I want is synchronous replication between two location (we have 10gbps fibre so no latency issues) and iSCSI, then we're into things like NFS/CIFS which are nice to have's.
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Jul 26, 2012 21:14
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Misogynist posted:Are you looking at 1 gig or 10 gig iSCSI? All of the V7000 controller models have 4x1GbE, but you'll need to step up from the 112/124 to the 312/324 if you want 10 gig ports. 10gig would be nice but if it's the difference between $100k and $150k it's irrelevant IYSWIM
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Jul 26, 2012 21:37
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Misogynist posted:The difference is practically nothing if you're talking about enough enclosures to hit that budget range, most of the V7000 cost comes from disk. Just looking at the options that are obvious - bit surprised they don't do 2.5" MDL drives yet do offer 3.5" MDL. I suspect the feature licensing can make or break you here i.e. synchronous replication and full unified vs. "dumb" iSCSI?
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Jul 26, 2012 21:56
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Misogynist posted:Stuff Thanks very much I suspect it'll be out of our price range for what we need as it doesn't seem to sit in the EQL/P4000 sort of upper-entry to mid-range, but I may well look in more detail nearer the time.
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Jul 27, 2012 18:56
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Caged posted:Oh god I can tell I'm going to get horrifically abused about this, but I'll ask the question anyway. We are looking to move to 'proper' storage for our VMs and files - from what I've been reading it seems that NFS is the way to go for VMware, and CIFS for your files stuff, combined nicely with things like snapshots so users can use the Previous Versions frontend in Windows to recover recently-deleted stuff. All sounds good. However, our budget is comparatively tiny. I need roughly 6TB for VM, and the same again for files. I'd look at straight iSCSI, Equallogic or P4000 give all the bells and whistles for one price. The thing to watch with anything from the big boys is licensing - if you're not careful they'll bend you over for pretty much anything/everything.
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Jul 30, 2012 19:11
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$30k per node for support.. gently caress!!
Bitch Stewie fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 09:34
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Misogynist posted:A product based on "virtualization bricks" that runs a dead-easy Isilon-like scale-out storage architecture and also hosts VMs would be loving incredible. It's iSCSI not NFS but at a basic level a commodity Dell/HP running ESXi and a HP P4000 VSA doesn't sound a million miles off, though it only scales so far.
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Nov 12, 2012 18:48
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:21 |
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Anyone have any 3PAR dealings? Their new 7x00 entry level arrays look like they're worth investigating.
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Dec 5, 2012 17:31
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