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Anyone have experiance with Lefthand boxes? We are looking to buy our fist SAN for our office. We currently have like 12 servers we are going to consildate (that, I've heard it too much) servers down to two. We are without a doubt going to use Hyper-v from MS. We use it now for development platforms and find it fast and relieable (as long as you don't put windows XP on it,  it just isn't aware enough and the disk and network I/O suffer. Windows 2003 and Windows 6 fly on it. )We have decided on iSCSI, we have zero Fiber Channel now and don't see the purpose of investing it. Not with 10Gigabit nics falling prices and that we won't even max out the one nic with the size of the san we will be throwing at our network. These are the three solutions we are looking at (we will proably decide right around christmas, I like to think of it as a present.) DataCore's SanMeldoy This is a very nice box, and affordable. Ultimatly we are shelving it though because its a host based solution. We hit the max IOPS of the box we can do anything but buy a new box to get more and even then you are limited to two controllers. Afterwords you need to go to their higher package and thier doesn't seem to be any upgrade path or what the cost will entail. LeftHand Networks NSM box Intersting box. The more storage you add, the more performance you get. You have one storage pool that is striped across all of thier boxes. I've seen reviews where with one box they where maxing out at around 1k IOPs and after another was added and stripped between the boxes the IOPS where getting a litte more then 1.9K IOPs. More boxes, more power. The framed SANs as Equalogic and Lefthand like to call the Dell AX and m3000i's have a a realitvly low IOPs roof compared to the potential Lefthand is showing us and what other tech sites have confirmed. Now, we won't proably need the insane amount of IOPs they are showing us, but the future expansion their would be nice for what ever is thrown our way in the future. Things that concern me that I will get to ask the guy tomorrow is if their snapshot manager will offhost backups so that the server being backed up with Symantec will not be moving the backup data through the lan ports, but instead the backup server mounting the snapshot volume and deleting it when done. Equalogic I've already seen some posts saying don't do it. Besides their hosed up priceing chart (Storage increase from one model to another that only adds 1k to the price if we do it ourselves costs 7k+ from them) I haven't seen any good reason why not to. It does have a controller cap that is a lot lower then lefthands, but even then I don't think we will hit it. I also don't get their retarded active/passive controller push. I'd rather get two seperate boxes witha single controller then and replicate with them. What I'd like to know is how fault tolerance is handled with them. I know I can slap two leftboxes on the network (same with datacore) and if one fails, the other steps right up and picks up where the other left off. We plan on having this in place by the end of next year. The Equalogic guy was being more vague about it and it was touting they got better IOPs. Which as some people have pointed out is debatable. I'll find out more tomorrow because I also am getting a free lunch out of them. Depending on what they have to say we may or not go with them and if it is a no it will be their outlandish price climb that is more like a hockey stick if graphed out and instead of slope like the other vendors.
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Dec 17, 2008 04:22
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oblomov posted:I've been looking at LeftHand and Equalogic both. Got both setup in my lab. Lefthand software appears more flexible, Equalogic seems more "rack-dense". Equalogic is a bit less expensive since Dell can discount quite a bit. Equalogic box we found had 4x the maintance costs then lefthand. We also found Equalogic to cost a lot more, but you may be larger and Dell isn't dicking you on the price. quote:Both appear to work just fine. Lefthand in particular has flexclone type of technology, thin replication, well done thin provisioning, multi-target replicas and couple other things. Downside is that for redundancy you are looking at somewhat large number of boxes. On the other side, you are not wasting space on spare drives. It would appear so as well to me that this is true. The one thing I did notice is that the Equalogic box will not do replication on the fly with two clusters always being eactly the same. The equalogic box will only do scheadule. quote:Equalogic offers better reliability in single SAN, and perhaps higher throughput (3GB per shelf vs 2GB for LeftHand). I think I/O is a bit higher per Equalogic controller as well, however, considering you would normally have 2 LeftHand shelves for each Equalogic controller, it's a wash. The Lefthand boxes tend to have less drives and will not max out the 2GB limit of the equalogic box. I don't even thing the PS5000 will get above 2GB as well unless you are throwing SAS 15K RPM's at it. quote:Power/Cooling I am not sure about. Lefthand has more boxes but it is more efficient. Equalogic does offer 5500 series box with 48 drives in it which is great if you just need bunch of space (think Sun with it's x4500 series). Agreed. quote:With Equalogic, if you lose the box, you lose all volumes striped across from it. Hence dual-controllers, dual everything pretty-much. You would basically have to fry the powersupply (so it short-circuits the system) or something. Lefthand system approach is much more flexible, they have multiple network RAID levels and if you lose one box, you are still good to go. Agreed, which is something we like to have in case I don't know a black hole opens up in the server room and sucks the box into dimension X the other boxes still left will keep us up. quote:One thing I am not sure with Lefthand is how the SAN will handle itself if there is a power/network failure. With Equalogic, we had power pulled couple times in a lab while running VMware with Exchange 2007 CCR clusters inside, and everything came back just peachy. With LeftHand we are going to test this next week The lefthandbox was a tiny bit slower to start backup but handled it just as well as the Equallogic box. quote:Also, I think Equalogic will provide you better support then Lefthand, or at least I've had better support and responsiveness with Dell then HP (both premium support agreements, whatever the new Gold contract is called for Dell, and the HP equivalent). Lefthand is owned by HP, but they are run as a seperate company. We would be caling lefthand for support not HP. Same goes for Equalogic. Also, Dell support can be pretty lovely even with gold depending on the time of day you call. If you are looking at the NSM 2120 ask about the G2. They just started shipping them and has double the performance almost. Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Dec 21, 2008 |
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Dec 20, 2008 22:05
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oblomov posted:IMO, HP is the devil :P. I refuse to believe a company that sells ink at $40 bucks a pop is the devil  Seriously though, don't get caught up on that HP owns lefthand. They are just owned by them, but like Dell they are leaving them alone.
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Dec 21, 2008 06:27
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oblomov posted:Well, for us Equalogic pricing is very good (quite large company). Equalogic is actually cheaper then Lefthand for the solution I was looking at. On the other hand we are just a around an 50 user software company. We fit in more with the Small Business. quote:Not sure what you mean. Do you mean you can't just kick off replication but need to schedule it? Haven't tried, thanks for the tip, will test it in the lab. I believe you have to scheadule it (5 min being min.) and if you so choose you can't have the replication actually be a mirror if you so choose. While the lefthand box has varying levels of Network raid and repelication. quote:Yeap, I doubt either will max out 2GB even with SAS 15K RPMs (that's what we specced). Only that monster 45 drive one might that Equalogic has, but that's more of storage need performance you are looking for. quote:Well, this is the setup for now, but you bet that HP is working on integration. Our usual Dell calls are very good since we have account managers we can call and bitch at if things don't go the right way, and then poo poo gets escalated. Unfortunally I can only tell you will most diffently have a much large SAN network. You may also want to look, I think the Equalogic as a controller cap while the Lefthand boxes have almost none.
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Dec 23, 2008 06:17
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ghostinmyshell posted:After some calls to higher ups, we finally got the right hardware, a decent tech and the problem resolved... only two days later. Dell does this poo poo too though.
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Dec 31, 2008 01:26
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brent78 posted:Any thoughts on the Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV? Earlier some guy in this thread had a lab full of them. I also didn't like the fact that the controller was active/passive. For the Price Dell wanted I could get two Lefthand boxes, Set the reduancy to 2 and get active/active and fault tolerance that if one box broke we would keep on going with zero downtime. They proably quoted you fancy numbers how they beat lefthand on perforamce with exchange. I looked that up too on MS's website. They didn't have redudancy, Lefthand had two clusters mirrored. If you took out that mirror the iops would go up. Also, do you need the SAS drives? Have you done metrics to see if you are overbuying? Remember, this is virtual storage. You don't need to buy what you will need in performance/storage 5 years down the road. Espically when 5 years down the road it will either be cheaper or even faster. Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Dec 31, 2008 |
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Dec 31, 2008 01:31
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oblomov posted:Rage, can you clarify on this? Is this through HP or Lefthand support? Personally, I think I am going to go with NetApp after all. Equalogic's lack of dual-target replication may just be a deal breaker, and I do not want to deal with these sorts of supports issues that were talked about with Lefthand/HP combo. I'd like to know how long ago he had the problem. Lefthand is now HP and I seriously doubt you would get any run around now.
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Jan 4, 2009 15:30
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oblomov posted:If it takes 2 days to repair a SAN, that's simply unacceptable. I seriously doubt now you are risk of a 2 day repair downtime and if you had to stay up and something extreamly bad happened to one of my nodes I'd remove the node from the cluster so the cluster would restrip and become redudant again if it went past 4 hours. Anyway, we went with lefthand and the boxes arrive thurdayish. Hopefully we didn't make the wrong decision, but I don't think we did.
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Jan 6, 2009 06:34
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oblomov posted:For example, NetApp can do NFS, CIFS, and Fiber in addition to iSCSI, so if any of that looks attractive, LeftHand simply can't do it. I'm not to thrilled with running NFS or any file service right off my storage. I'd like to minamize its attack surface. Also, unless you have long sequantial reads/writes (movies) you don't need fiber either. And with 10 g/bit cards on the market if you have no fiber already, starting now is proably a waste.
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Jan 17, 2009 15:46
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brent78 posted:I just saw an article about Pillar Data laying off 30% of their workforce.. and here I am with 100k to spend on a SAN and can't even get them to return my phone call. Anyone using Lefthand VSA in production? It sounds very cool and scary at the same time. I'm using Lefthand boxes, but not the VSA. Unless you got storage already to virtualize, I'd proably go with the phsyical boxes. For 100k you can get several nodes to increase performance and fault tolerance.
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Feb 4, 2009 04:46
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bmoyles posted:Yeap, the tier 3 was SATA, tier 1 was 15k FC. If you are going to look at Equallogic, look at Lefthand too.
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Feb 5, 2009 02:55
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brent78 posted:Just wanted to post that I got a shelf of EqualLogic 5000VX setup in the lab and I'm very impressed with it's performance. It's configured with 16 x 300GB 15k disks, active/backup controller and all 6 gigE connected to a pair of 3750's. Using jumbo frames and receive flow control as well. I'm achieving 200 MB/s writes with ease and barely sweats with mixed random reads/writes. This shelf as configured was 40k, not the cheapest thing out there but on par with 15k SAS. The equivalent NetApp or EMC solution would have been double considering all their retarded licensing costs. Ohh you want iSCSI, caa-ching. Chiming in as well that you should give Lefthand a try. We just purchased it and haven't regerted it yet.
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Feb 11, 2009 10:54
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spiny posted:Is it possible to buy a NAS or even a SAN bare board ? I have a dead surestore tape drive and two spare SATA disks and would like to combine the two into an external storage box Check out SanMelody from Datacore. Not exactly what you want, but might still fit what you need.
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Feb 11, 2009 14:37
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brent78 posted:Edit: Whats a ballpark figure for a fully populated SAS lefthand solution? Take whatever cost the hardware is and add like another 10-20. This is very rough, the other guy that had a lab with clusters of them can proably give a much better figure. Who's trying to push you to the VSA? Lefthand or the reseller? They just literly came out with a G2 box for one of their NSM's.
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Feb 12, 2009 02:30
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Update since we put Lefthand boxes in production... They are awesome Users are starting to notice the increased preformance as crap is moved off the DAS.
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Mar 6, 2009 07:40
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Number19 posted:I go on vacations, and I could get hit by a bus or some poo poo. I love this line, it's like the only way you can tell your boss to gently caress off you don't need him while keeping your job. Well sort. Though I try to my best to make sure they are not dependent on me so I can go vacation and in case I do leave no one is left feeling bitter. I also have no ill will against my current bosses anyway. Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Apr 19, 2009 |
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Apr 19, 2009 12:53
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Syano posted:What limitations would you say it has? You'll be moving up in features for sure. One limitation that comes to mind when using our Lefthand boxes is that while you can clone a volume you can never split it from the point where you cloned it. The 2 or volumes are forever attached by a common snapshot. I'm actually upgrading to 9.x right now that just came out but I'm not even sure what's new about it besides ugprades being totally automatic (the process, you still have to start it). I'll find out more about 9, but I needed to get them all to match in the cluster on version number. I think I was told before MPIO imporvements. The box you have now is diffrent SAN storage methods really from the lefthand. Take a closer look at the P4000 boxes (lefthand), you will like them over what you got. Cultural Imperial posted:I know of at least two large telecoms/outsourcers that standardize their oracle databases on NFS. One of these telecoms runs the billing system for a national utility company using 10 GbE with NFS. 
Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Jan 1, 2011 |
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Jan 1, 2011 21:36
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Maneki Neko posted:Not sure what that's about, as even Oracle themselves runs their poo poo on NFS. We are talking about network file storage vs iSCSI right?
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Jan 4, 2011 23:50
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what is this posted:Yes and not to rehash this discussion for the 20th time but it's more like "only oracle hosts supports database filesystem writes over NFS." And even then it's only in their rigorously controlled environment where they validate all the parts of the NFS chain. Here's a good read on NFS VS iSCSI too. http://lass.cs.umass.edu/papers/pdf/FAST04.pdf
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Jan 7, 2011 04:34
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szlevi posted:Right except I am having problem figuring out how much advantage Server R2 gives you (sans somewhat better SMB). Multi-Monitor support  Seriously thugh lots improvements and MS has a handy list.http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/why-upgrade.aspx Intrepid00 fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Feb 26, 2011 |
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Feb 26, 2011 04:25
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Wasn't there a firmware upgrade a while back for the RAID to prevent this or did you really have that much bad hardware?
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Jun 13, 2011 02:02
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InferiorWang posted:Has anyone installed the Fail Over Manager for an HP4000 series? The only download I could find for the latest FOM(9.5) was a zip file, but the docs say nothing about a zip containing a couple VMDKs and an OVF. The FOM does indeed keep quorum. Don't however put it's storage in the SAN or it won't be operational if one is list. You also only need to use it if you don't have 3 or more regular boxes as they would be better to run the manager. When I install it the installer created the VM from start to finish, I just had to set the drive to use. I used the Hyper-v one though so the process of setting it up is probably diffrent.
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Oct 27, 2011 05:29
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NippleFloss posted:Correct. NFS has no protocol level load balancing. It can only piggyback on network layer load balancing, at least in current versions of the protocol. It is more than that. http://lass.cs.umass.edu/papers/pdf/FAST04.pdf
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Mar 18, 2012 00:46
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NippleFloss posted:I have no idea why you posted this and what it has to do with discussions of load balancing mechanisms. Caching performance. Your load balance will benefit greatly from iSCSI's type of caching and update methods overall.
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Mar 18, 2012 01:30
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HP's Lefthand boxes have version 10 released  Finally, a patch to the VSS provider I've been waiting for.
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Dec 3, 2012 23:29
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