Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

I've been using Datacore's SANMelody software-based SAN lately. It runs on top of a standard Windows Server install. From my testing, it works pretty well. Has anyone else used it?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2008 15:36

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 08:22

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

Guys, I need a hand.

My first project upon getting hired at my week-old job is to deploy an Exchange server, migrating away from the expensive hosted Exchange we're currently using. Over the next few days, I discover that we actually need to deploy at least 3 new servers including the Exchange box. We're in a two-server environment with one of them needing to be retired (the whole network is a mess...the loving DC is running RRAS and is the NAT for the network. Yes, I am deploying a real firewall first and foremost.) I, of course, decided to move to a virtualized infrastructure. I will buy a single box to deploy VI3 on, do a P2V conversion on the retiring DC, and use it's hardware as a DR/dev box with ESXi.

That leaves me looking at storage, and that's where I need a hand.

I need a relatively low-cost iSCSI SAN solution with as much redundancy as possible. Dual active/active controllers, RAID6, dual PSUs, etc. A few vendors have been trying to push the following on me:

Fujitsu ETERNUS2000 model 200 with 12x 300GB SAS 15k drives and redundant everything for about $14k

Hitachi SMS with 2.4TB worth of 15k SAS drives and redundant everything for about $12k

Does anyone have any experience with either of these? Does anyone have any suggestions for something else with all the redundancy AND SAS drives for the same price or cheaper?

I know I can pickup a StorVault for pretty cheap, but as far as I know they are single-controller only.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2008 15:59

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

I'm looking around the same price range as you, actually. I think I've settled on this:
http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/simple-modular-storage.html
Dual active/active controllers, RAID6 with a hot spare, 12x 300GB 15k SAS (2.7TB total), 4x gig-e NICs, and prepackaged replication and snapshotting software. Final price = $11,395.

I can't really find anything else with those features that is competitively priced.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2008 01:14

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

Aquila posted:

Did you ever purchase this? I'm torn between one of these (except with 750gb or 1tb sata drives) and a similar Netapp Storvault s550.

As far as I can tell I'd be paying ~$5000 more for the Netapp name (and associated very nice things).

Does anyone here have any hands on experience with either of these? Are there any forums or sites out there more dedicated to high end storage?

I actually just placed the order today after doing as much research as possible.

The massive amount of redundancy in the box along with not being able to find any negative press or reviews sold me on it.

I was looking at the StorVaults too, but the lack of redundancy ruled them out for me.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2008 19:51

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

Woah woah woah, as far as I know, the s550's only ship with a single controller. Did my reps tell me wrong?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2008 04:16

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

Catch 22 posted:

You can get a EMC AX4-5i DP for under 20K with over 2.4TB (12x 300GB SAS 15K) of RAW usable storage. Its 19K right off the Dell site, CDW can come in under that as they can cut out the "installation" costs that Dell/EMC toss in. If you haggle with Dell they will remove it too putting you closer to 17K. If you have an account with Dell they will knock off more.

edit:If you go with EMC, make sure you buy from who EMC registers you with, as they can toss in a extra year of support for free!

The HDS SMS100 is right around 12k-15k, has dual active/active controllers, and can come with the same spindle size/count. I just got mine in, but haven't had a lot of time to mess with it yet.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2008 00:00

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

Okay this is completely random, but if anyone has a HDS SAN (the SMS100 in particular) and you enable the "account" license feature just to see what it does, the login is root with password being storage. That was sort of embarrassing.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2008 03:15

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 08:22

Ray_: Sep 15, 2005; It was like the Colosseum in Rome and we were the Christians." - Bobby Dodd, on playing at LSU's Tiger Stadium

So, what are everyone's thoughts regarding stripe size for LUNs?

Isn't it basically smaller for maximizing I/Os and larger for maximizing file transfers?

I just read this Technet blog (here) regarding Exchange disk parameters:

Technet posted:

4) Tune storage array parameters. Some suggestions: 4kb cache page size (only if Exchange is the only thing on the array, otherwise leave it at 8kb). Maximize the write cache -- this is HUGE for Exchange performance; we're very write cache effective. Minimal (50-100mb) read cache. Enable cache watermarks. Enable read&write cached for all luns. Stripe element size of 64 blocks (32kb).

5) Align disk partitions to stripe size. If you've got a stripe element size of 32kb (see #4, just above), you'll want to make sure you've aligned your partitions to a 32kb boundary to prevent inefficient access to some of the blocks of data. Most of the SAN vendors have much better docs on this than I can provide here.

The 32kb alignment is different from the VMWare-recommended 64kb alignment. Is this suggestion just for Exchange?

I'm going a little nuts here. Most of my previous SAN work was with Datacore (former company's vendor of choice), and it was ridiculously simplified. I'm thinking for my Exchange LUNs I should set the stripe size to 64kb, align the partition at 32k boundary, and set allocation size to 32k. Does that sound correct?

# ¿ Nov 21, 2008 19:22

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