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Thanks for the thread, 1000101. Anyone out there using Dell's MD3000i box? We're just getting to the point where we need something low-end, due to increasing interest in virtualization and an unwillingness on my part to replace an ancient Proliant ML350 file server with another traditional file server. We don't have anything terribly IOPS-intensive we'd be putting on it; probably just Exchange transaction logs SQL transaction logs + DB for 200-person company setup, so I don't think iSCSI performance issues are worth worrying about for us. It's a 15 spindle box, so we're thinking about carving it up thusly: 1) RAID 10, 4x 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives: SQL DB 2) RAID 10, 4x 146GB 15K RPM SAS drives: SQL transaction logs 3) RAID 1, 2x 73GB 15K RPM SAS drives: Exchange transaction logs 4) RAID 5, 4x 450GB 15K RPM SAS drives: VMimages, light file server use (with 1 spare drive for whatever RAID set we decide most needs it) That'd take care of our immediate needs and give us some room to expand with additional MD1000 shelves (2 can be added to the MD3000i, though the IO doesn't scale at all). We're a small shop and have no experience with SANs, so I could definitely use some feedback on this idea. Mierdaan fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Aug 29, 2008 |
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Aug 29, 2008 19:39
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Mierdaan posted:Thanks for the thread, 1000101. Floating this question again 
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Sep 4, 2008 18:12
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optikalus posted:I've been looking at the MD3000i as well, mainly because it is the only iSCSI filer that Dell sells that doesn't use insanely expensive disks. Have you looked at any vendors outside of Dell? The reseller we work with is pretty big on Dell, so I don't know how biased they are; they're claiming wonderous things about the 3000i. "optikalus posted:Those disks should yield a healthy 170 IOPS per disk (vs. ~130 for 10k) so that would be ideal for a database. If your database can live fine on 680 IOPS, its probably good enough. "optikalus posted:That extra drive should be used as an universal hot-spare, though.
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Sep 4, 2008 19:29
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Auslander posted:Oh man, this thread is a welcome sight. Haha, I'm right where you are. We're looking at the Dell MD3000i and the AX4 right now, and the jump from crappy DAS to a real (if low-end) SAN is just imposing.
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Sep 18, 2008 20:48
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Misogynist posted:And you ain't kidding, the performance on the MD3000 is really not spectacular What do you mean by not spectacular? I mean, the most IOPS-intensive thing we're throwing onto it is Exchange 2007 install for 250-ish users pushing about 600 IOPS. Are we going to be unhappy? 
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Sep 18, 2008 22:35
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1000101 posted:That EMC box is a fine piece of equipment. I have a customer who just installed one and is pretty happy with it. What reasons can I use to convince management to go with the AX4-5 instead of the MD3000i? The Equallogic box is cheaper, and I fear that's all they're looking at right now Tell me tales of woe, SHSC.
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Sep 25, 2008 18:34
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Catch 22 posted:Connectivity- The AX4s are optional and can be upgraded later to Fiber, EQL is iSCSI only. Catch 22 posted:Controllers-The EMC works in a Active/Active mode, meaning they both do work and should one fail the other takes on the full load. This gives it better performance over the EQL Active/Passive controllers because you only get to use one controller (thus 3 ports even though it has 6 total) Catch 22 posted:Max Host- EMC is 64 and the EQL is 512. *gasp* EQL wins? Not exactly, if you want to try and pound out 512 hosts on that thing, be my guest. EMC scaled the hosts correctly for environments the AX4 is applicable for, don't let the Dell rep talk it up because it has a higher number. Catch 22 posted:Drive options- EMC lets you mix and match in the same array enclosure and lets you span LUNs over multiple DAEs, EQL is a all or nothing in one enclosure and it can only be one mass array. NO LUNS. This means your applications are all trying to get a bit of the pie, unlike a dedicated performance LUN. Ask the EQL guy about LUNs, he will avoid it or try to say the "array" in the box is like a LUN. Catch 22 posted:Capacity-EMC 584 GB to 60 TB, You can scale it one drive at a time. EQL will make you drop a cash load to buy another fully populated DAE. Catch 22 posted:Cache-EMC, 1 GB per Storage Processor (2GB), EQL-1 GB per controller Catch 22 posted:Tell me abit more about your environment and I can help more. I'm not trying to pick apart your post; I really want there to be good reasons to go with the AX4 as I keep hearing ghost stories about horrible performance etc with the MD3000. Our environment is pretty simple for right now; we'd be running, at most, an ERP and Exchange 2007 for a 200-person company, light file sharing, and potentially an PE2950 ESXi box hosting a few light-work Server2003/2008 VMs.
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Sep 26, 2008 21:45
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Thanks Catch 22 and Vanilla, I'll do some more reading For reference, the EQL box we were quoted was - Dual controller - 4x 300gb 15k SAS - 4x 146gb 15k SAS - 2x 73gb 15k SAS - 5x 450gb 15k SAS for $14914. Since that comes to 15 spindles total, we'd need a DPE+DAE AX4 setup. An identical combination of drives (+4 for the vault software) would leave us 5 empty drive slots, but the first quote we got (different resellers here) was $23432. So the price difference is definitely non-trivial
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Sep 29, 2008 14:07
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I was originally talking about the Dell MD3000i; I don't know what EQL product number that is (it is EQL hardware, right? Not Dell-manufactured?), I only know it under the Dell line. Their configurator tool on the Dell site lets me pick any of these drives: 73GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$209] 146GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$244] 300GB 10K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$454] 300GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$489] 400GB 10K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$524] 1TB 7.2K RPM Universal SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$482] 450GB 15K RPM Serial-Attach SCSI 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$559] 500GB 7.2K RPM Universal SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$244] 750GB 7.2K RPM Universal SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$328] 1TB 7.2K RPM Near-Line SAS 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$489] 500GB 7.2K RPM Near-Line SAS 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$307] 750GB 7.2K RPM Near-Line SAS 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$391] 1TB 5.4K RPM Energy Efficient SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in HotPlug Hard Drive [$482]
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Sep 29, 2008 16:42
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rage-saq posted:No, the MD3000i is a box from LSI. Equallogic are totally different products, but I wouldn't buy either. They are both rather immature products in a large number of ways (web management, strange limitations and non-competitive price/performance). Thanks rage-saq. What would you say is the best bang for your buck in the $15-$25k range? As previously mentioned we don't currently need anything with crazy good performance, but we don't want to handicap ourselves later. Only need about 3-4TB usable space, with the ability to scale up later.
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Sep 29, 2008 17:22
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rage-saq posted:What kind of features? How many hosts? What kind of disk configuration? Snapshots are really all we'd be looking for right now. Don't need replication as I'm still working on getting the first device in the door 20 or so hosts would be reasonable for the forseeable future. Disks, we could realistically go for a mix of large SATA and smaller faster SAS drives, but our first stab at carving up 15 spindles in the MD3000i was: 1) RAID 10, 4x 300GB 15K RPM SAS drives: SQL DB 2) RAID 10, 4x 146GB 15K RPM SAS drives: SQL transaction logs 3) RAID 1, 2x 73GB 15K RPM SAS drives: Exchange transaction logs 4) RAID 5, 4x 450GB 15K RPM SAS drives: VMimages, light file server use (with 1 spare drive for whatever RAID set we decide most needs it)
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Sep 29, 2008 17:33
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Catch 22 posted:EMC 2U SAS/SATA 12 DRIVE DAE What's the quantity on those lines? That's close to what we were quoted, would love to compare prices 
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Sep 29, 2008 17:37
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How does the Snapview SKU work for the AX4? We didn't have it on our quote, but were assured we had the capability to do snapshots. Does Snapview get you some additional functionality we wouldn't have, or is our reseller just including but not as a line item?
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Sep 29, 2008 17:42
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rage-saq posted:Additionally, the MSA2000 series is a block-level virtualized storage system, so you don't necessarily have to carve up disk groups based off I/O patterns like you do with traditional disk-stripe arrays. Can you explain this a little more? I've always felt like I was missing something by carving up disk groups like I did before, so I'm glad to know I am. I just don't understand quite what
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Sep 29, 2008 17:47
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Mierdaan posted:
Reposting this question on a new page Is rage-saq just talking about the ability to automatically move more frequently-used data to faster disks? That makes sense if you have slower spindles in your device, but if you cram the whole thing full of 15k RPM SAS drives I'm not quite sure what this accomplishes. Again, totally missing something
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Sep 30, 2008 15:20
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rage-saq, Vanilla, thanks a lot for the explanations. I think I see the light now
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Sep 30, 2008 19:25
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H110Hawk posted:To diverge from the thrilling debate about some Dell bottom of the barrel disk enclosure... Sorry we don't all have 23 thumpers to brag about. Seriously dude, you're a loving dick sometimes.
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Oct 4, 2008 03:27
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Didn't see this posted yet, so, HP acquires LeftHand for $360M.
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Oct 6, 2008 15:05
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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! Mierdaan fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Nov 19, 2008 |
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Nov 19, 2008 19:34
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Is there a good online resource for finding out what Netapp's different software licenses actually allow you to do? Their online doc on SnapDrive is horrible, horrible marketing garbage.
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Nov 20, 2008 16:44
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Cultural Imperial posted:Unfortunately the only good source is the NOW support site. What would you like to know? I'm not even sure, really. I wanted to read through some different documentation on the various Snap* and Flex* products, just for my own edification, but wasn't finding much.
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Nov 21, 2008 00:05
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Well, we've been hosed. We went through a lengthy selection process between HP (MSA 2012i), Netapp (FAS2020) and EMC (AX4). We decided on Netapp, and were planning on buying it through PC Mall. Midway through the process, though, we started getting frightened by how little our PC Mall rep actually knew the product line (e.g. told us the FAS2020 had 20 drive bays instead of 12, told us it didn't do deduplication when it does, etc), so we took our quote from PC Mall to our trusted local VAR, played matchmaker with him and Netapp (they previously had a bad relationship) so that we could get the same pricing we were getting through PC Mall, but buy it from someone who wasn't an idiot. So all is well and good, our local VAR gets the same pricing and we buy the unit. It arrived yesterday, we unboxed it and found out... it only has one controller in it. Despite a dual-controller configuration being talked about in all of our conversations with PC Mall, their quotes had always listed the following part numbers code:So, the question is, what do we do now? We went with the Netapp for good reasons, and don't want to return it, but it isn't the device we thought it would be. Netapp has said they'll sell our VAR a second controller for $7400, and we could get it for that price, but I'm not even sure if that's a good deal. Anyone with access to Netapp pricing know if we're getting hosed there again, or if they're actually trying to bend over backwards for us like they assure us they are?
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Jan 29, 2009 15:35
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Yeah, I know. Thankfully we're not the kind of shop that loses billions of dollars for every hour of downtime or anything, so the idea of running with a single-controller unit doesn't keep me up at night. We probably wouldn't even see any performance boost from a second controller unless we add more shelves, correct?
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Jan 29, 2009 16:29
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It was a strange situation. Our VAR is normally very good, and when we initially approached them they stated outright that if we wanted Netapp, we should probably go somewhere else, as he felt like his pricing through his existing supplier wasn't at all competitive. In the middle of the process, when we wanted to ditch PC Mall, we got contacted by a local Netapp rep. We put that guy in contact directly with our VAR so they could get better pricing to our VAR, and that was most of our VAR's work on this. We basically gave him our (already hosed-up) PC Mall quote, and said "get this configuration with this price and we'll buy it through you." So that's what he did, the error just propagated unnoticed. I know our VAR isn't putting a markup on the controller at the price he gave us; that's what Netapp is selling it to him for. Mierdaan fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jan 29, 2009 |
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Jan 29, 2009 19:38
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1000101 posted:It supports clustering. We had to upgrade one of our client's 2020's to support it but it does work. The only fault with the 2020 is that its basically a dead end platform. The 2050 is generally a much better fit for people and has a lot more expandability. Worst case you can turn a 2020 head into a dumb shelf of disks for a 2050, I'm pretty sure. We were moving to this from a few ProLiant ML350s with four 72GB drives in RAID5, on a shoestring budget, so... it may not seem expandable to you, but it's like the Promised Land for us.
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Feb 2, 2009 15:56
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Performance question. I've got an ESXi server with a VMFS LUN on our Netapp FAS2020. I need to create a file server VM which needs to serve up two shares, 500G each. I can't cram all of this inside the VMFS LUN because the A-SIS engine on the FAS2020 won't run against a volume larger than 500G, so I'm stuck separating at least the shares out in some way. Will I see any performance benefit by creating these as VMDKs in additional VMFS LUNs, or by just hooking the Server 2008 VM directly (ISCSi) to the LUNs and letting it format them with NTFS? What's best practice here? Thanks storage goons.
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Mar 3, 2009 17:21
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Thanks. I found this study on VMware's website that seems to indicate it doesn't make too much of a difference, and honestly this isn't a high IO file server. I'm probably worrying too much.
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Mar 3, 2009 18:20
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rage-saq posted:I'd advise against getting any kind of advice on important system design from what is essentially the best buy of product fulfillment centers. Call in a consultant and engage with them in a discovery and project assessment for virtualizing your infrastructure. Check out my post history in this thread if you want to see why you shouldn't do this.
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Mar 20, 2009 04:09
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Netapp question: We have a FAS2020 connected to an entirely segregated iSCSI network, and then through the BMC for ssh management. Is there any way to force Autosupport emails to go through the BMC's connection, since the other network it's connected to is completely isolated?
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Apr 17, 2009 17:23
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Number19 posted:My VAR was talking about putting my ESX datastores in NFS instead of iSCSI. I believe he mentioned something about it being easier to resize NFS volumes. We didn't go into a lot of details about it as this was just a get to know you" kind of deal. Another good reason to do this is so that ESX can see the savings from deduplication. We have our ESXi stores done over iSCSI and while the filer happily dedupes, ESXi isn't aware that its stores are a good 60% less full than it thinks they are. edit: but that's what we get for not paying for NFS/CIFS licenses. Stupid shoestring budgets.
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Apr 20, 2009 17:17
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KoeK posted:If you do not need any performance at all you could look at the Netgear RNR4410-100EUS, should be between $1700 - $2500. It is rack mountable and has 4 1Tb disks. The drawbacks are the absolute terrible speed, the annoying web interface and the crappy build quality. I have one of these I think, from when they were made by Infrant and mine only has 4x 500GB drives. It is absolutely terrible and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
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Jun 22, 2009 18:34
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Misogynist posted:Their support might suck but don't be a chauvinist douche Post/username combo, right here. content: For a FAS2020, is there anything I'm doing wrong that forces me to spend half my time rebooting these damned BMCs? Pretty frequently, when I try to ssh to them I get 'server unexpectedly closed connection' and NetApp's answer was to just reboot the BMC. Works fine, but it's happening frequently enough that I'm this close to using the filerview command line, and ugh.
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Nov 29, 2010 20:25
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I've been getting Autosupport alerts all night about failing power supplies and spare disks for a FAS3170 at a credit union in California. I've never heard of this credit union; I have no clue why I'm listed as a contact for it. I hope their actual storage admin knows 
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Feb 23, 2011 19:11
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three posted:Are you bob@bob.com ? Edit that out please, I don't want people knowing my email address... Seriously, no I have a pretty specific email address that you wouldn't get by hammering on a keyboard. I'm also already in Netapp's system for my own filers, so clearly some bits got lost somewhere. edit: Ed, from the credit union's mailroom just called me to let me know I have a package waiting. I told him to give it to the IT department.
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Feb 23, 2011 19:38
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You might get an answer here, but you'd probably have better luck in the Home Storage megathread.
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Mar 4, 2011 17:25
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Timdogg posted:Also, Dell is trying to push their "iSCSI Optimized" switches, but I have limited experience with their switches and am hesitant to jump in now. Anyone recommend them? We got one of these pieces of poo poo - terrible decision. It's sitting unused on a shelf now, I'm trying to convince my boss to let me run it over with my car since we replaced it with a 3560.
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Apr 19, 2011 16:55
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Dreadite posted:We're looking at the possibility of getting a SAN for our office of ~25 users. We wouldn't need more than 2TB of space, or anything particularly fast, but we'd like one for all the cool features that come with a SAN. I think Misogynist's question from above applies to you too; we picked up a FAS2020 as well when we were getting into low-end enterprise storage, but I think the VNX line is a better bang for your buck now. Misogynist posted:Have you looked at EMC's lower-end VNX line?
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Apr 20, 2011 20:54
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Seeing the Unisphere video made me realize how bad I have it; are there any good management tools for NetApp? We're still on 7.3.3 unfortunately, since our 2020 won't run 8.x code.
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Sep 12, 2011 14:28
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madsushi posted:I like NetApp's System Manager, their 2.0 product (in open beta) is actually pretty sharp. Oh; I tried that in 1.1 and it was terrible, I'll give it another shot!
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Sep 12, 2011 16:41
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My boss had the misfortune of trying to buy some Compellent kit right as the acquisition was wrapping up - it was a pretty high-priority purchase for him, and they couldn't get anyone from Compellent on the phone because they'd all hosed off to the Bahamas for two weeks or something.
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Oct 18, 2011 16:55
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