Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

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Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

EMC Goon checking in. I'd be happy to check into any SR's/issues any of you seem to be having. Just a lowly CE but I can help if you think your SR's getting hung up, or at least I could let you know what the current status of it is.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2012 06:51

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:06

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Rhymenoserous posted:

15-25% was what the EMC CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR told me in class. Depending on changerate. If you don't know what your basic changerate is, or it's particularly high default to 25%.

As a CERTIFIED VNX IMPLEMENTATION SPECIALIST, I can confirm that this is correct. As Rhymenoserious said it is highly dependent on the change rate of your LUN. You don't want to go over that 25% or else your snapshot suddenly becomes useless.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2012 14:56

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

GrandMaster posted:

It's been a while since we bought storage, but we just got a quote for 9x 600GB 15K disks for an EMC NS120.. Just the disks, no DAE.
The quote was $21k AUD, we're being bent over right? It seems reaaaallllly expensive, I'm sure we bought a dual controller AX4-5i for about $25k around a year ago.

You're getting those directly from EMC with a service contract attached? If so then you're paying for the service contract more so than the disks. Honestly though if you do any amount of business with EMC just take the quote back to your sales guy and tell him that's way too high, how about half of that. Maybe wait until near the end of the quarter?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 04:25

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Rhymenoserous posted:

So as long as your just sharing out chunks of storage to do well... whatever the hell you are doing (I have no clue) you will be fine. Sidenote: if you are doing linux stuff I'd get a device that can do NFS as well as iSCSI. iSCSI plays really nice with windows, NFS is a breeze with linux.

iSCSI works great no matter what OS you're running...

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 15:40

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

FISHMANPET posted:

Oh my God this P4000 that I've inherited is terrible. Does anybody know where I can find some documentation? I can't even begin to make heads or tails of what's going on.

Like here? http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12169-304616-3930449-3930449-3930449-4118659.html?dnr=1

# ¿ Sep 12, 2012 00:44

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

ZombieReagan posted:

I'm starting to look into Storage Virtualization appliances to help give us some more flexibility in mirroring data to different sites and dealing with different vendors arrays. Have any of you actually implemented one of these? I've been looking at EMC VPLEX and IBM SVC so far, and on paper they seem great. I'm not going to get any horror stories from anyone in sales, and I don't know if there really are any to be had as long as things are sized appropriately.

You could also look at Cisco's DMM on MDS series switches with an SSM module.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 17:57

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Goon Matchmaker posted:

I'm having a serious gently caress EMC day. I just ran across a stupid bug in their sans.

If you have a vmware host with an IQN that contains uppercase character(s) and you enable chap with the VNXe3300, the VNX will replace the uppercase characters with lowercase and the login from the ESX host will fail.

Example of the failure case:
ESX IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:NORTHSTAR-05ec8187
VNX IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:northstar-05ec8187 (never mind that I pasted the ESX IQN directly in to the VNX, the VNX still did the replacement.)

Example of a working case:
ESX IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:northstar-05ec8187 (had to enter this manually into the ESX SWISCSI adapter.)
VNX IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:northstar-05ec8187

I think this is likely a bug in the UI of the VNXe but I'm not sure.

You are correct that it is a bug in the VNXe's software. The offending version appears to be 2.2.0.17142 and the bug was fixed in the subsequent version 2.2.0.17384. The ways to fix it in place are:

1) Change all of your IQN names to only include lowercase letters.
2) If you don't want to do that, you would need to have Engineering log into the box to perform some back end magic (seemingly to hand edit the IQN names in the configuration) to allow for the uppercase IQN's. They would potentially need to log back in at a later time again if the names got changed back to lower case in the config.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 20:27

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Internet Explorer posted:

Oh man, I don't know whether to post in the poo poo That Pisses You Off thread or this thread first.

Left my employer about 3 weeks ago. My IT director was clueless and lazy and the people above him were way too interested in being bad at business.

They started having trouble with the VNX 5300 unit I have mentioned several times in this thread. At this point they still don't know what went wrong. 4 people in the IT department had access to that password, which was left as part of my documentation. None of them knew how to find it even after several emails informing them of where it was and me mentioning it several times before leaving.

They couldn't log in to the SAN to fix the problem because they didn't know the password. So what did they do? They unplugged it. At like 8:30 in the morning. Of course, bad things happened. They're still down 12 hours later.

There may or may not be a way for a local CE to assist in recovering said password...

# ¿ Oct 11, 2012 07:34

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

FISHMANPET posted:

To be honest I don't really know what the data is yet, as I haven't actually been there for an experiment. We've got a 9 node LeftHand SAN with about 30 TB of total space, and a VMware cluster, so I can setup pretty much whatever I want.

I had a hard time explaining the concept of network storage to the "IT Manager" so I'm not entirely sure what he's envisioning yet. My suggestion, which is very simple, is just send everything to a file server. Instead of the system writing data to c:\experiment, have it write to \\server\experiment. And then Mr "IT Manager" got in a tizzy about how all the software would have to be rewritten for each experiment blah blah blah. It was pretty bad. But Eventually I got it in his head, but we decided that we'd like a copy to be local in case anything bad would happen and we wouldn't lose data. Our experiments cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to run sometimes, so we like as many safeguards as we can get.

And when I say continuous, I really mean continuous. So as a file is written to a local directory, that same data is streamed to a networked location.

You could always mount the share to a drive letter if that would make him feel more better.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2012 06:22

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Vanilla posted:

Data Domain is the current king. They start with little DD160 arrays which are cheap (I recall $10-20k??).

I've got a lot of customers that love their Data Domain appliances. If my opinion counts for anything, I may be slightly prejudice.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2012 19:01

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Reason you stick with FC is because the infrastructure (cables and such) is usually pretty future proof. Lay the cable once and you can keep switching out SFP's/switches to newer faster speeds without having to re-wire your datacenter.

That and current brocade switches support 16Gbps FC.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2012 17:33

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Goon Matchmaker posted:

SPB on my VNXe3300 just took a poo poo. So far work hasn't called me so I think SPA took over but we'll see tomorrow :/

I'm really starting to hate these VNX SANs.

Keep in mind the VNXe is the baby brother of the VNX. It's the replacement for the AX series SAN's. Not to excuse it for having an issue, but hey, that's why you have redundant SP's.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 01:26

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

GrandMaster posted:

Then again, we are still on crappy old CX3 arrays which probably aren't even capable of pushing data out faster than that so YMMV.

Do you have the 4Gbps to your DAE's? You'd be surprised how much data those can put out... That is if you're running a CX3-80.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 04:07

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Rhymenoserous posted:

It's EMC dude. The VNX and VNXe series are actually the odd ones out due to being affordable. Everything else EMC does is expensive as hell. And that's before they charge you for the software that you thought came with it.

That said you're a fool if you're paying list. 50% off is the defacto starting point for negotiations.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 20:36

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

stevewm posted:

We don't use the encryption version... I mainly picked it because of the interface system they call "USIB". The drives themselves are SATA. However the interface smarts are built into the cable that you connect to the back of the rack. If you want it to connect to USB, you buy a USIB-USB cable, if you want FireWire, you buy a USIB-Firewire cable, etc....

The removable enclosure itself has the same connector as the rack it slides into, so I can plug in a USIB-USB cable and connect it to any machine without the rack if needed.

We also use their smaller "Jupiter" system (http://www.addonics.com/products/jupiter_cipher_dcs.php) that is sized for laptop drives. It makes a neat backup solution for a small office.

But why in the world would you want to do this? Use USB3.0 or e-sata and be done with it. And don't try to use the excuse of not having a USB3.0 or esata port, buy a card and save some money.

What struck me most about that product was this FAQ:
"Q. Why can't my Addonics storage device be powered from the USB port since the BUS power option is included in the USIB interface cable?
A. USB power from different computer varies from manufacturers and models. Different type of storage device also demands different power to operate. In general, Flash memory, Micro Drive and 1.8" hard drive can be powered directly from USB port. Most of 2.5" hard drive (particularly the newer models) can also be BUS powered. Slim optical DVD+/-RRW drive may only be BUS powered by some computers."

Why are they talking about DVD-RW's and 1.8" hdd's when the product they are selling is (seemingly) based on flash drives and 2.5/3.5" HDD's. Beyond that they apparently have no concept of how USB power is standardized at 500mw per port *minimum*. How in the world is a standard variable in their minds?!

Seems like you would be better off getting an eSATA drive enclosure, setting it up for some flavor of RAID and using that instead of some hodgepodge of "proprietary" (it's a bloody IEEE 1284 LPT port for goodness sake) port nonsense.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2012 23:09

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

stevewm posted:

At the time the stuff was bought there was no USB 3.0 yet, and eSATA was just never considered. We had used the laptop drive sized versions for some years so we stuck with what worked for us. It may only be 2.0, but speed wise its perfectly fine. Its used for backing up some files that are taken off-site daily. Not sure how a eSata raid enclosure work help in this case...

eSATA = 1.5Gbps -> 3Gbps -> 6Gbps Going from SATAI through III. Essentially no matter what you're looking at 3-4x faster throughput than USB 2.0 if you use a SATAI based eSATA.

Honestly what you should be doing is consolidating all the files you need to backup to a standalone NAS appliance (with RAID protection) and using a large external to back that up for your dailies. Unless you're up against some serious budget issues, in which case management needs to re-think what their data is worth to them.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2012 05:23

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

stevewm posted:

Way overkill.. backing up a 17gb SQL database and imaging the drive for bare metal recovery using windows server backup.

Got several locations spread far apart and poo poo internet connections to go along with it so a simple local backup solution works the best for us.

Anyways back to your regularly scheduled thread, sorry for the derail

Oh, if that's all that's being backed up, you could just use USB thumb drives then.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2012 20:35

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Rhymenoserous posted:

In raid 5 with hotspare. How many USB ports do you have?

No no, raid 61.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2012 01:06

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

skipdogg posted:

^^^^ With this guy. I would just spend enough to buy on site spares for everything and gently caress the maintenance fees. Vendors push that poo poo because its 85% pure profit. Working spares should be pretty cheap for kit that old.

Not sure I'd bet my job on an ebay spare... The last thing you want is an incompatible firmware bringing down the array for who knows how long while you feverishly type, search and call your way to a fix after 24+ hours of unscheduled downtime during the week. That profit is what keeps folks like me in a job and new products rolling out the door.

No one ever got fired for letting a vendor do the work. CYA and all of that.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2012 07:06

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Misogynist posted:

Put into the simplest possible terms: it would be neat to have something nearly identical to an Isilon cluster, but that had gobs of RAM and used its system resources for running virtual machines instead of providing file-level NAS services.

I believe those are called Blade Enclosures.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2012 21:48

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

szlevi posted:

Isilon never been cheap but now that it's carrying the EMC logo it would be even more expensive, not to mention the exodus of old hands from Isilon, the rash of issues in the the past year or so I heard of (from costumers and ex-eomployees) etc etc.

Rash of issues would be news to me. I know of several customers throwing serious capital at huge isilon clusters. In the 8 figure range.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2012 05:02

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

evil_bunnY posted:

I don't think I could resist asking an oracle rep how the Solaris core dev team is doing if I ever had one in my office

Might be even better to ask how their racing yacht is doing...

# ¿ Dec 7, 2012 16:33

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

GrandMaster posted:

Does anyone have experience with Compellent? We are considering making the move from EMC, but I'm a little hesitant as EMC is all I've ever known and we've had a pretty good experience from them overall. Cost is obviously the driving factor here, but since it will be much easier for us to migrate onto another EMC system and they have already been proven then they are still in the game.

I've seen a few gotchas in this thread about the VNX series, but not a lot around Compellent so I was wondering if anyone could share their good/bad experiences?
On paper they look pretty good.

We are running ~100TB, workloads are typically: Oracle OLTP, MSSQL OLTP & OLAP, ESX & vCloud Director for self service vm provisioning.

What do you mean by gotchas and do you need block of file level access?

# ¿ Dec 13, 2012 06:03

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

skipdogg posted:

Looking for a good intro to SAN book. I know the absolute basics, but I guess I'm looking for more detail. I know what a LUN is, but what purpose does it have, why are they created. I know that iSCSI and Fibre Channel are connection protocols, but what makes them different and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Basically a good foundation book with some general best practices. It doesn't have to be vendor specific, but we're an EMC shop if it matters.

http://www.amazon.com/Information-S...d+Management+v2

# ¿ Dec 14, 2012 19:50

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Not to mention latency.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2012 03:46

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

pr0digal posted:

I'm hesitant to look at Active Storage solutions because they are possibly going out of business and I have EMC breathing down my neck about their Isilion system. So I would appreciate some suggestions regarding affordable storage solutions for a media company because honestly I'm in over my head when it comes to SAN solutions.

I may be a bit biased, but Isilon basically rocks.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 22:23

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

I don't quite understand your question either. Are you asking if while mirrorview is synchronizing the data from siteA to siteB will you still have access to that data on siteA, the answer is yes.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2013 05:03

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Alfajor posted:

That's what I thought Now if only I could find an official document that said something like that.
Anyways, thanks. At least now I know what's right, and that's a good thing to be sure of.

Here's the white paper that describes how mirrorview works. http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h2417-mirrorview-know-cx-series-flare-wp-ldv.pdf

# ¿ Feb 24, 2013 20:17

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Goon Matchmaker posted:

It's still storage for dummies...

Also keep in mind that VNX arrays don't wait for a hardware failure to fault out a drive. If the software determines that the health of the drive is compromised (soft errors, etc) it will proactivly copy the drive to the hotspare, fault the drive out, and send an email to the array contact (and EMC if so configured) informing you of the failure. So you only go into a state where you rely upon the parity in rare occasions where the hot spare is being re-built from parity due to a catastrophic drive failure or you've run out of hot spares and another drive faulted out.

So sitting on a raid5 and relying on single parity isn't as terrible as you might initially imagine.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2013 03:25

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

doomisland posted:

We just got an Isislon cluster and I was going to be there while the tech would set it up in the rack (this is at a remote site across the country). They shipped the wrong Infiniband cables so not only did they overnight more cables they also are paying for me staying out longer than I needed to. The new cables were the same ones and were wrong again. Is this typical?

Did they ship ones that were too long or too short? I may be going in for an interview at isilon tomorrow and would happily look into things for you.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2013 06:41

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Just added 3.24 raw PB to a customer's environment in under 3 hours today. Yay scale-out nas!

# ¿ Apr 23, 2013 05:40

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Misogynist posted:

Isilon? Clearly you're not talking about something with FC zoning and manual LUN creation.

You are correct. Added another 1.1 PB today.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2013 00:04

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Internet Explorer posted:

If I ever meet anyone responsible for the VNX line I am going to punch them in the face. Our two VNX 5300 were the buggiest pieces of poo poo.

What did you do to those poor little things? Only time I've seen issues with them is during upgrades to 5.32 flare code.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2013 15:57

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

skipdogg posted:

Confirm/Deny EMC Powerlink's website is terrible.

Powerlink is Dead, long live support.emc.com.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2013 21:22

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Internet Explorer posted:

I'll admit to knowing nothing about what you are talking about, but is sounds like you could just present a vdisk to your VM over NFS and then just format it with whatever encrypted file system you want. Is there any reason you can't? Just because the vmdk is on NFS, doesn't mean you can't install whatever file system you want and encrypt it.

The application might require a physical server.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2013 03:13

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Internet Explorer posted:

Just as I thought I got away from the EMC VNX, a new client has an EMC VNX we are inheriting. Ugh. Hope they have fixed a few bugs in the past year or so.

Lots of bugs and moved to a new major revision.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2013 00:36

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Goon Matchmaker posted:

Also tends to hose itself when moving to the new major version.

Just make sure you write down your DNS and NTP settings before you go hog wild and there shouldn't be any issues.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2013 23:21

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Caged posted:

This is when you get given poo poo for wasting $9600 every time you've ordered a server.

Especially when that e-machine is never obsolete. $400 you never have to spend again!

# ¿ Jul 19, 2013 02:33

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

Zorak of Michigan posted:

Due to a series of mistakes we found ourselves in a situation where we had to get ready for a major acquisition without the opportunity to properly analyze and measure the incoming environment. It was a sufficiently big deal that we opted to just buy way too much of everything. Better to waste money than to tell the board that we were unable to integrate the new company's systems. I was only working the UNIX side at that time but when I look at the current utilization figures for the servers I specified, I feel shame. I wasted a lot of money. On the other hand, we absorbed the new company and never ran short of UNIX compute, so I gave them exactly what they asked for.

Now we're out of that rather ridiculous situation and able to properly instrument things. Unfortunately we're also able to take a hard look at revenue and costs. We can't keep paying for storage at current rates. The idea of using just a small Vmax tier is interesting. I'm not sure management would bite unless we go for a storage virtualization solution. We won't want to take an outage to move someone's LUN on or off of the VMAX tier.

Just to confirm, you guys are looking at VMAXe/VMAX10k's as well right? I'll jump on the tiering bandwagon as well. How much of that 3PB needs to be available within miliseconds, and what might you be able to throw into an EDL (or something similar)?

# ¿ Aug 2, 2013 07:16

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 00:06

Amandyke: Nov 27, 2004; A wha?

skipdogg posted:

Dammit your right. The VNXe does file level dedupe and compression. I have plenty of space so I'm not even going to worry about it

Not 100% accurate, here's a whitepaper that describes the dedupe and compression on the VNXe.

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h10579-vnxe-deduplication.pdf

# ¿ Aug 21, 2013 15:12

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