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In general, what are people doing to back up these large multi-TB systems? Our company is currently looking at scanning most of the paper trail from the last 20 years and putting it on disk. We've already got a direct-attached MD3000 from Dell so we're not worried about storage space. However, backing up that data doesn't seem to be as easy. If it's to tape, does LTO4 provide enough speed to complete a backup within a reasonable window? If it's back up to disk, what are you doing for offsite backups, and how can you push so much data within the same window? I think I may be missing something obvious here, and if so proceed to call me all sorts of names, but I don't see an ideal solution.
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Jan 21, 2009 23:14
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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?
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Oct 27, 2010 16:46
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It just seems to me like refreshing SAN hardware every 3-5 years is such a waste of money and resources. Our plan with server hardware is to make them redundant virtual hosts and run them until they are either over-utilized, or die. At that time we'll replace the dead hardware with current. This lets us buy servers with only 3 year warranty without risk, and if our existing servers are any indication, we could get close to 8 years lifespan out of them. I had thought this may have been more common with SAN hardware; it's hard to imagine companies dropping $50k or more every 5 years to replace hardware that will most likely run for another 5 years without issue (excluding hard drive replacements). We're a smaller company, and I'm fighting tooth and nail to get a $15k Dell MD3220i approved, much less schedule that purchase on a regular basis. I guess even considering mirroring the SAN, if we purchased one now, and then in 5 years purchased a second and mirrored them to give the same type of redundancy of virtual hosts, the first SAN would most likely fail before the 10 year mark, which means one is buying a 3rd set of hardware right on schedule. At least that way the original SAN wouldn't be sitting on a shelf gathering dust.
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Oct 27, 2010 22:15
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Hok posted:If it's just a single server with direct attached storage, get an MD1200/1220, 6Gb sas is a lot less hassle than fiber and a hell of a lot cheaper, if you want a couple of servers connected, MD3200/3220, they've got 4 6GB sas ports on each controller, so you can hang 4 servers off them and still have full redundancy on the links. Somewhat related, we're looking at an MD3220i with two hosts, and since we don't expect to grow beyond two hosts for a while, we're thinking about cutting out redundant switches between the servers and the MD3220i. If we do this, is loadbalancing still possible across the links when direct connecting? For example, will it work properly to connect two NIC from server 1 to Controller 1, two NIC from server 1 to Controller 2, and the same for server 2?
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Nov 8, 2010 21:41
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adorai posted:I have witnessed each of these three events: single failed disk taking down an array, firmware upgrades failing an array, and a failed head and the partner didn't take over properly. Were these all on the same unit? Not saying that's an excuse; I'd blacklist HP storage altogether if this was just one unit in my environment. More curiosity.
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Nov 20, 2010 00:40
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Syano posted:I have one in production at the moment. For an entry level SAN Im not sure it can be beat. The one big feature I wish it had was replication but other than that its been a great unit. Syano, can you describe a bit of your environment and how you have your MD3220i carved up with disk groups and virtual disks? I've got two Dell R410's with 6 NIC's total, and an MD3220i (and MD1200 attached). I am using Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with Failover Clustering. I've got 2 NICs teamed at the host level and set up as an external virtual network in Hyper-V. 3 NICs are dedicated to iscsi storage (direct attached without a switch since only 2 hosts), with 2 ports to controller0 on the md3220i and 1 to controller 1. The opposite for the other host. The last NIC is a direct link between the two hosts for cluster heartbeat and live migration. I've got MPIO set up and working properly (I think), and my plan was a single disk group of 16 disks, one quorum LUN and one big data LUN that is turned into a CSV in the cluster. However, I keep getting warnings from the MD3220i that the preferred path is not being used, and my live migration is failing. It seems like I'm doing something wrong, and reading this only re-inforces that: http://www.delltechcenter.com/thread/4305668/MD3xxxi+-+disk+groups,+luns+and+VMware+-+tips+to+separate+out+LUN+path?offset=40&maxResults=20 General thought there is to spread disk groups across controllers, but that doesn't fit my plan of one big disk group and one LUN as a CSV within the cluster. You mentioned earlier you're using your MD3220i with Hyper-V, so any examples would be great.
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Dec 16, 2010 22:31
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Syano posted:
I've got it fixed, and it was either what you suggested (since I had 3 nics per host used) or just a mistake in the MPIO settings. I went back to 4 nics per host, two per controller, and now it appears to be working correctly. Time to start doing some performance benchmarking.
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Dec 17, 2010 05:43
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Nomex posted:
I really don't understand how disk to disk is more popular than tape with actual usage scenarios taken into consideration. With our LTO4 tapes, we can store 1TB of data per tape, offsite. How can disk to disk compare to that? We have about 4 TB of an older MD3000 we could use for disk to disk, but it's slower than LTO4, and would fill up within a week. Sure, de-duplication would solve that issue, but it still means we'd need to spend big $$ to get disks faster than our tape, and we'd still have no offsite backup solution.
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Jul 18, 2011 17:01
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KS posted:I'm looking to add some secondary storage for D2D backups -- about 25TB, and I don't want to take more than 2-3U and ~$30k. Not opposed to roll-your-own for this, but only if it saves a bunch of money. Performance needs to not suck. It needs to export as either NFS or iscsi. I'm looking at doing this same thing, and am leaning towards something like this guy did using a SuperMicro SC847 - 36 drive chassis and FreeNAS. Configured half full with 18 x 3TB drives is about $8,000 from CDW, and would give over 40TB of usable space. Its definitely a 'roll your own' solution, and I'm not sure how fast it would be, but for that price the capacity can't be beat.
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Jul 6, 2012 19:21
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My new backup SAN is up and in testing. It's a SAN if it's using iSCSI right? Not bad for $7500 with a Supermicro SC847 - 36 drive chassis.
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Aug 31, 2012 19:31
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evil_bunnY posted:Joke's on you if you're on BE though. Backup Exec gets a lot of poo poo, and most of it is deserved. However I've been backing up 3TB to tape for the past few years with it, without issue. I expect a few hurdles with BE 2012, especially going to disk based deduplication, but because of the full feature set and lower cost, its still the logical choice over something else like AppAssure or Veeam.
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Aug 31, 2012 20:34
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I'm curious what others do when their SAN comes up to end of warranty (specifically the controller/head)? I don't have any experience with high end storage, but do have a Dell MD3220i with 3 MD1220 disk shelves. The MD3220i warranty expires in December 2015, along with one disk shelf. Two disk shelves were bought in 2012, and we're considering a 4th shelf in 2014. I don't want to waste money on a 4th shelf if it won't be usable 12 months later, but even if I can just replace the MD3220i, the model itself will be quite old and presumably nearing EOL. Is it common to just drastically oversize capacity for a full warranty term, and then do a complete replacement every 5 years?
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Sep 26, 2013 04:00
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parid posted:Even if they did let you quote 6th year support, you wouldn't want to pay for it. They normally structure the pricing to make it cheaper to upgrade. I recently did a head uplift on a fas3070 netapp. One additional year of support was %70 of the cost of a pair of new fas3250s with PAM cards. It was a no brainer. On a head upgrade like that, do you normally just keep the disks and shelves running regardless of warranty, since they're in a redundant state anyways?
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Sep 26, 2013 04:48
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Syano posted:Has anyone here ever added a shelf to a Dell MD3200i? The official documentation says you have to shut down the system to do it but I've seen anecdotal evidence that this just isn't the case. Wanted to know if someone has actually ever done it. I've got an MD3220i and over the years have expanded twice. Once with an MD1220 and an MD1200. Both times I did not shut down, and suffered no ill effects; I had the extra capacity added to my disk groups within a few minutes.
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Oct 9, 2013 19:28
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Caged posted:I've been reading a bit into Scale-Out File Servers and it's almost impossible to read anything about Hyper-V that Microsoft have produced without also coming across it. What I'm really struggling to work out is what the point of it is? It seems to be pitched at the lower end of the market as a less expensive SAN alternative, but needs two servers to act as the redundant hosts, a dual-ported JBOD shelf, RAID controllers that can understand what's going on etc. I see it as particularly useful for large data capacity with flexibility over a longer term. As Syano mentioned you can generally beat it on price by a Dell MD3200i, but when that unit is out of warranty you're looking at a forklift upgrade of it and all it's chained disk shelves regardless of their status. With a SOFS you'd be able to gracefully add and remove disks and shelves from your pools without any interruption of service. Plus you get the additional features of a SAN that wouldn't normally be available on something like an MD3200i like the auto-teiring, ssd cache, and others. It does come at a cost of manual setup and maintenance though.
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Feb 12, 2014 18:18
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My EqualLogic PS6500ES arrives tomorrow; I'm so excited!
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May 20, 2014 19:07
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theperminator posted:We've lost faith in Dell and their Equallogic line, and we're thinking of switching over to something else. Would you mind expanding on this? I've just recently purchased a PS6500ES and am very happy with it, but have no experience beyond that.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:58
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