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This might not be the right crowd, but any idea how something like a Netapp box has a pool of drives which are connected to the two head units? They can assign which drives go to which in software as well. The only solutions I can come up with involve a single point of failure (eg, using a controller and serving up the drives each as their own LUN to the heads).
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Mar 6, 2010 08:18
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complex posted:You're asking how it works? Basically there are two FCAL loops, with a controller at the 'head' of each loop. In a clustered configuration each disk actually has two different addresses, so each head could access it if the other went down. Picture a disk that has two connectors on the back of it, connected to two different controllers. As long as each controller agrees on who is the doing the work, everything is fine cause they won't step on each other. That's essentially what I figured they were doing. Multipathing, but instead running the second path to the other controller. It seemed to me though, that whatever they were using for that became a new single point of failure.
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Mar 6, 2010 18:26
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H110Hawk posted:Via magic, faeries, pixie dust, and most importantly lots of money.
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Mar 6, 2010 21:30
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Cultural Imperial posted:If you're asking what I think you're asking, it works like this; with ONTAP 7 and above, the disks contain metadata written at the RAID level which assigns the disks to their respective controllers. This is called software disk ownership.
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Mar 7, 2010 20:31
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lilbean posted:You may be better off looking at just building a couple of systems and using something like DRBD to mirror a slab of disks.
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Mar 7, 2010 20:57
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FISHMANPET posted:I can get a quote from our Sun vendor in a few hours. You've gotta find yourself a local vendor. They're always cheaper than anything we can get directly from Sun or CDWG, although we save money being an EDU.
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Mar 7, 2010 21:09
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EnergizerFellow posted:With the deduplication need, I'd look into the NetApp FAS2040 (w/ DS4243 tray if you need >12 spindles), which is the only 2000-series worth looking at (otherwise go to the FAS3140, but that's closer to $70K with a DS4243 tray). FAS3140 does have a lot more CPU horsepower and expansion slots, however. On the EMC side, look at the NX4, it's basically an AX4 with NFS/CIFS/dedupe. We bought a FAS2020, and the NX4 just seems like the better choice in the long run for us. Fortunately EMC is buying it from us (for more than we paid!). Plus NetApp lied about the storage capacity, failed to mention the dedupe maximums, etc.
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Mar 20, 2010 02:33
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Oh hi everyone with HP SAN equipment, http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2010/Dec/102
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Dec 14, 2010 17:55
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Holy poo poo I almost had a heart attack this afternoon. One of our drives failed on a SAN in Oakland, and since my coworker (also in IT) was going over there, I asked him to replace the drive, drive zero (stressing it was drive zero). The drive had failed the day before, and was severely degrading performance. He goes over there, and immediately ejects drive 1. I promptly freak the gently caress out and yell at him for trying to destroy the RAID5 array. He responds "but I thought these drives were hot swappable!" Thank god I had a hot spare running or bye bye 8tb of data.
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Mar 5, 2011 00:17
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paperchaseguy posted:haha, well maybe you should have a support contract and a CE to do disk swaps if your co-workers can't count to zero. Sad thing is, we do. I can get the part and replace it faster than they can get a CE there. Also we had just moved that office, and for EMC, changing addresses is a multi-day affair, and since I needed the drive replaced as soon as possible, I thought we could do it. I guess I thought wrong.
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Mar 5, 2011 01:51
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Maneki Neko posted:Looks like Microsoft released a free iSCSI software target for Windows Server 2008 R2.
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Apr 5, 2011 05:41
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Syano posted:I am pretty curious about this too. Based on a pointer just a few posts up I started researching into Nexentastor and on paper the concept looks fantastic and like a perfect fit for an upcoming project.
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Jun 28, 2011 15:40
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ZombieReagan posted:Definitely, this...FAST-Cache will help keep you from having to add more drives to a pool just for IO most of the time. I'm actually looking at building our own poo poo with Gluster (I really don't want to do this). It will cost roughly the same, but could be 100% SSD. Why can't someone offer something for smaller offices that still have a really high IO need?
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Sep 15, 2011 05:36
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Vanilla posted:EMC is especially anal about flash drives and it's all to do with things like data protection, failure rates, reliability, etc. Support for cheaper ones like Intel drives would be nice, but I get their reluctance (all the issues with Intel's firmware), which is why I was looking at building my own.
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Sep 15, 2011 17:49
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optikalus posted:Make sure you run some tests before you set your heart on gluster. The performance was just acceptable at best in my test cases, which was still quite a bit slower than even NFS on a LVM vol. Also, this was with a TCPoIB scheme and gluster would hang/crash when using RDMA. My benchmarks were done a year ago, so maybe they're completely invalid now. Internet Explorer posted:I read in this thread that you run two, but I am not sure how true that is. Wouldn't surprise me. My point was he said 10k a piece, which is not accurate.
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Sep 16, 2011 04:00
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Things that are pissing me off: EMC. I don't know what happened in the last six months, but their support has been absolute poo poo recently. Nevermind that the NX4's that we have keep throwing up errors for a successful sector reconstruction, but when they throw out an unrecoverable sector error, EMC requests 8 or so sets of SPCollects (log dumps, drive status, etc), accuses me of creating several of the collects before the error happened (why the hell would I do that?) and then determining that because none of the drives had faulted everything was fine. After about 18 or 20 of those, they finally get out to replace the drive, and replace it with a bad drive. Try again next day, finally get a working drive, yay. Flash forward a week, and something tries to read off the unreconstructable errors, causing the controller to crash, so the other controller takes over, tries to read the same thing, and crashes. Why didn't they mark these sectors as a part of the replacement? Good question. It caused nearly 18 hours of downtime for one of our offices, and two weeks later, I still can't get them to give me an explanation of why they didn't do anything. Add that to the fact that they're continuing their "three years and your platform is dead, time to buy again brand new!" system, and the Compellent pitch we just got this week is looking mighty good. Their hardware lasts through revisions, they keep them upgraded, adding new technologies just means adding a card, mixed drive types, tiering, virtualized RAID, they seem to be hitting every sore spot that we're having with EMC. It almost seems too good to be true. Their price is more than we would like, but I'm not dumb, I know we would eventually spend as much on EMC, and then spend more three years later to replace it all. Does anyone have any experiences that would break the magic spell Compellent has put on me?
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Nov 12, 2011 01:19
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Vanilla posted:So speaking quite honestly an NX4 box is basically as low as it gets and is very old. Support is likely the same. Also, Compellent can do SSD and tiering, I'm not sure where you saw they couldn't.
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Nov 12, 2011 20:45
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Vanilla posted:The support you've experienced is truly awful and I'd make sure EMC knew it. Let the rep know, also on any CSAT reports that come through. Also, just got an alert from the NX4 I was complaining about, MORE UNCORRECTABLE ERRORS. Fuuuuuck.
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Nov 12, 2011 21:17
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Vanilla posted:Naaaaaa bro, the VNXe has been in that space for aaages.
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Dec 2, 2011 05:34
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Spamtron7000 posted:Why don't you? If your company is OK with running its infrastructure on whitebox equipment and a heavy software layer then I agree - it's pretty awesome what Compellent has done. Personally, I would only consider them for 2nd tier storage. EMC is a giant pain in the rear end to deal with but in this job market I know I will never lose my job because I selected EMC. They work well. They're reliable as hell and they have a great reputation among the fringe IT crowd (aka, my CTO). If my EMC SAN went down the first thing my CTO would do is call our EMC rep and chew him a new rear end in a top hat. If I had a Compellent SAN as primary storage and it went down, the first thing my CTO would do is say "what the hell is Compellent and who's dumb idea was it to run our infrastructure on it? Fire Spamtron." Compellent is pretty big, and it's owned by Dell now. It's also not "white box" equipment, you're just showing that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. It's like saying EMC Avamar is a white box just because it's just a Dell 2950. EMC support is so horrible it's better to consult the homeless dude begging for change outside of the McDonalds rather than call them. In the past two weeks I've had one SAN go down twice, each time for over 24 hours. EMC's solution is to have a conference call and tell me that not only is it likely to happen again, but the way I should fix it is by buying brand new EMC equipment. Their sales guy had the balls to call me in the middle of the second downtime and congratulate himself for the timing of the new quotes he had made. Their west coast support lead told me that it's likely to happen again, and that simply put, the drives they overcharge us for are worthless and are known problems. They claim that they design for reliability and stability but get a bad sector? Kernel panic, corrupt the filesystem, extended downtime. Not only is this completely unacceptable, they act like it's expected, and not a big deal. Oh yeah, just delete the array, recreate it, rebind the LUN, restore everything from backup. This is not what we purchased a SAN for, this isn't what we pay support contracts for, and isn't sane. After speaking with a friend who also runs EMC equipment, and having him say that he's had almost the exact same issue on vMax equipment, there's no way I could recommend it. Additionally, EMC believes that we should replace all our equipment every three years, which is insanity. We can't spend $100,000 every three years, and have to do complete forklift upgrades because they came out with a new model and jacked up support rates to an insane degree. This has hit us twice, and we're not stupid enough to go back for more. Compellent has offered a clearer upgrade path, offers forwards compatibility, and with Dell behind it, I don't see this changing anytime in the future. Additionally, since Dell split with EMC, they are offering steep discounts on replacing EMC equipment, which makes them no longer have the huge price premium over other vendors. PS, I've literally had to type things for support people because they have no idea where any of the utilities are, how they are used, or even what piece of equipment they should be accessing. They've not known how to open a command prompt, they've referred me to KB articles that simply tell me to escalate the issue to a higher level, and then when I ask to escalate it, they ask if I've followed the KB first. Yeah, I don't know what Dell's Compellent support is like yet, but I'm willing to risk it rather than deal with EMC support again.
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Dec 2, 2011 18:57
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Spamtron7000 posted:Sorry - the point of my post wasn't to bash Compellent but if you think Compellent has the same level of redundancy and reliability EMC has, you're kidding yourself. Dealing with EMC is a pain in the rear end but I've had good luck with their support. Their PM's make me want to stab myself in the face and their software is notoriously clunky but I'm still happy with them as my primary storage vendor. I'm glad I haven't had the same experience as you - that's what I was getting at. If I ever do, I'm sure I'd feel the same way.
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Dec 2, 2011 20:54
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Bluecobra posted:Here is what a Compellent SC40 controller is: I think newer ones use http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-r810/pd but my point stands. It's not that using off the shelf parts makes a whitebox, it's the support behind it (and to some extent, the name) that makes it not a whitebox. If I were to build my own SAN from the same parts, it would definitely be a whitebox, but purchasing it from Compellent, with their software, their support, and their name, makes it more than the sum of its parts.
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Dec 3, 2011 18:23
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Internet Explorer posted:So the quality of a SAN depends on how easy it is to rack? Because I am fairly sure our VNX 5300 was a bitch to rack. No sort of "rapid rails" there. Ready rails are pretty awesome though, since I can install them one handed.
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Dec 4, 2011 00:46
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Hok posted:You're not the only one, I don't think it's far off either, I'd heard Q4 but I'm not sure if they'll make that now
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Dec 4, 2011 06:44
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Spamtron7000 posted:I'll get a full writeup from EMC this week.
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Dec 19, 2011 05:26
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KS posted:I've worked with a bunch of vendors and I really like our Compellents, but Netapp and 3PAR are the other vendors I'd recommend without hesitation in the entry enterprise space. I'm sorta surprised to hear you're moving away from Netapp. I doubt Compellent really picks up a lot of their customers. Not the series 50 that is coming out at some point soon? (When does this NDA expire?)
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Jan 9, 2012 01:41
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For fucks sake EMC. I've had this one unit showing drive 0 failed for two weeks now. Everyday they call me and ask me to send SPCollects (log files), which I inform them over and over again that I can't do, it errors out. But every day they ask the same thing. They send a tech out, he looks at it, says he can't talk to it, does nothing, and bounces me back to web support, who again does the same song and dance. EDIT: What the gently caress? These things run Windows XP Embedded? Serfer fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Feb 15, 2012 |
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Feb 15, 2012 22:34
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Ugh, tonight I was doing some UPS maintenance and had one of the SAN slots down while I was moving in the new UPS, and the other slot decides to panic, taking down the whole thing. Ruined my night. It came back up fine, but more unexpected downtime isn't what I needed.
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Mar 24, 2012 06:11
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Well poo poo, the same thing that happened to one of our EMC SANs in Los Angeles has happened in our Oakland office now. It hit a bad sector and took down the array. I was up until 2am working with support, but they don't want to do anything because apparently when it hit a bad sector, it also caused the management agents on the storage processors to crash, so they can't see what's going on with the backend. This is insanity, and I'm very glad I had already moved half the stuff to our new Compellent SAN. Unfortunately not the really important stuff yet, but I'm definitely through with EMC forever.
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Mar 30, 2012 15:54
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Internet Explorer posted:Well, that's terrifying. What model and OS version? You know, when you're done picking up the pieces of an exploded SAN. evil_bunnY posted:There are no words, basically. What model? It's an NX4 (AX4 with an NFS frontend) version 5.4.something, yes lowend stuff, but it was good enough at the time. Now that we need more, we've ordered Compellent. Last time this happened they basically said, "lol this happens, buy a VNX to fix the problem!" See these previous posts: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=397522968 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=398198862
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Mar 30, 2012 17:45
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Serfer posted:It's an NX4 (AX4 with an NFS frontend) version 5.4.something, yes lowend stuff, but it was good enough at the time. Now that we need more, we've ordered Compellent. So after spending 14 hours Saturday and 10 Sunday in the Oakland office, they say "Oh it's a software problem, you need an upgrade" "Ok, great, except I requested this upgrade twice before, said I'm perfectly willing to do it myself, but you won't give me access to the files needed to upgrade, and you guys totally ignored my two previous requests." "But this time we have managers in on the issue" All you need to have happen if you want something done is to have your SAN totally stop working. The machine is still throwing unrecoverable parity errors (they say they're false, I doubt it), and storage processor B is crashing every couple hours, but hey, it's accessible, problem solved.
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Apr 2, 2012 19:58
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Serfer posted:So after spending 14 hours Saturday and 10 Sunday in the Oakland office, they say "Oh it's a software problem, you need an upgrade"
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Apr 3, 2012 03:43
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FISHMANPET posted:We're most likely going to be getting Compellent for our main server room on campus, but I'm thinking an Equallogic would be pretty good for another department we support, I guess you'd call it a branch office. Unless Compellent offers something redundant in the 15-20 TB range for same amount of money as Equallogic.
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Apr 6, 2012 05:44
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As if you needed another reason to not buy EMC, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDhx6ECNww4
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May 26, 2012 03:20
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Speaking of EMC being terrible, I wasted three hours of my time working with yet another know-nothing EMC tech. I knew things were going to go bad when he tried to cd and ls /dev/hda7. Then he mounted an iso loopback and after doing df, said the upgrade couldn't proceed because one of the drives was 100% full (care to guess which one?).
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May 26, 2012 19:11
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Anyone have any experience in clustered file systems like glusterfs or swift? I had setup a test gluster system like a year or so ago, but it seems like its gotten much better. Swift seems nice because of how it integrates with openstack. I probably wouldn't be doing anything but storing virtual machines on it, so some of the things like remote object access aren't terribly important, but being incredibly scalable with consumer hardware, asynchronous geo-replication, etc, seems like they would be very nice features to have.
Serfer fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 19, 2012 00:38
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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. Isn't this pretty much what openstack is supposed to be? I mean with an openstack distribution like airframe, you just connect the machine and it boots into openstack, gets its storage added to the pool, and becomes a VM host.
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Nov 9, 2012 01:14
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MrMoo posted:That's what pnfs and lustre are for and used in many places exactly so. It's anyone using ceph? It seems attractive because it combines block and object, but I'm not sure how widely used it is.
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Dec 12, 2013 19:12
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My boss wants me to build a SoFS system with clustered controllers on an Intel JBOD 2000 system with Samsung SSDs and interposers... How hosed am I 1-10.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:32
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Number19 posted:11
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Jun 28, 2014 03:04
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