SAN replication

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

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I'm trying to look for some SANs that support replication, next year we're hopefully getting two identical SANs to use as vm storage to make all our servers driveless boxes and allow for expansion.

Ideally im looking for something supporting SATA drives but SAS is a possibility if there aren't any supporting SATA drives, seems anything that supports it aren't cheap either, so can anyone recommend any makes and models of boxes that support replication and some idea of how much they cost?

EDIT: just lookin at a netgear readyNAS 4200...
Remote backup to another ReadyNAS via rsync and secure rsync
Multi-system cloning

is that their way of saying it does replication or is that something else altogether? I've never used a netgear readynas, always used infortrend eonstors.
 
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Depends on your budget really. Plus I would not really use a NAS for VM storage, maybe the odd like VM use but anything serious you want a SAN.

We use HP Lefthands, and this support site to site, different schedules etc.

But it all depends on your budget
 
Ideally we're looking to spend £15k or less for two boxes, whether this is realistic for what we want i'm not sure though. Looking at the price of those HP lefthands it's probably not very realistic :p

We use an infortrend Eonstor A16E-G2130 at the moment which will continue to be used as the file storage but i want something a bit more special to put all our VMs on and i want reliability through redundency for the VMs. I could get an identical eonstor for £4500 including 32TB of space which is a bargain but the box just lacks the ability to make me feel safe in the event of a controller or other failure.

It might be that two replicating boxes is overkill and that a box with both redundent power and controllers would be good enough for our needs, i think i need to do some more investigating.
 
We picked up a 4Tb lefthand for about 9K you can get smaller ones. Just depends on the space you need.

Kimbie
 
Are they easily expanded? i know nothing of lefthands, never seen one let alone used one, any spec/tech sheets you can link me to?

the actual storage is normally dead cheap, do you have to buy hp caddies/drives for them?
 
You dont expand a lefthand as such.

If you buy a 4Tb one it comes with 4Tb of storage and you can not expand it in terms of replacing it with bigger disks as far as I know.

You can network raid them, so if you had 2 you can do a RAID1 mirror over the network, so you data is striped on each lefthand then replicated between them, if you had 3 you can do RAID5 with the lefthand units.

I have a whole bunch of stuff in work to do with them, some presentations etc that I can email over to you if you want.
 
Ah i get you now, well for our requirements the smaller lefthands would be sufficient so perhaps they are a pretty viable option :)

If you could email me some details to my trust that'd be brilliant, cheers nikumba
 
Looking at the "Lefthand P4300 G2 7.2TB SAS" system, all the pictures on all the sites show what looks like two boxes. Do you purchase these in pairs or is that just the funny way they've made them look?
 
Overland Storage S2000's are cheap, and work well in a VM environment (they support Persistent Reservations which is a prerequisite for Hyper-V clustering), they have mirroring, or can have fully blown replication for additional licensing costs.

We've got two on site running our Hyper-V SCVMM cluster.
 
Vanilla said:
Check out the EMC VNXe.
Click to expand...

Seconded, definitely the best current storage option at the low end. We're currently using them for <100 user solutions. I'm building one in the lab and it's super easy to setup with a great feature list... and it supports replication.
 
If none of the above you might be able to pickup some Dell Equallogic PS series.
Though might be stretching the budget a tad if you want more than SATA drives in them.

Dell will usually ship you a couple of units on demo to have a play with :)
 
I'm not using the latest version of the Lefthand software so maybe this has changed but you'll be better off going for 3 units, having 2 in the same location. The SAN needs quorum so if the link goes down between the sites (split brain scenario) then the 2 units will still be working, the last unit will stop exporting volumes.

You can accomplish this with 2 units by starting a virtual manager but that is a manual action and your san will be down until done.
 
SGI IS5000 aka IBM DS3500 aka NetApp E2600

2U box with either 24x 2.5" or 12x 3.5" drives - expandable up to 192 drives.
iSCSI, SAS or FC connectivity and support for Remote Volume Manager which will do sync or async replication.
It uses SAS drives but the high capacity Near Line SAS are pretty close to SATA prices.
 
bluebox said:
SGI IS5000 aka IBM DS3500 aka NetApp E2600

2U box with either 24x 2.5" or 12x 3.5" drives - expandable up to 192 drives.
iSCSI, SAS or FC connectivity and support for Remote Volume Manager which will do sync or async replication.
It uses SAS drives but the high capacity Near Line SAS are pretty close to SATA prices.
Click to expand...

AKA Dell MD3200 as well.

I've heard worrying things about what NetApp are doing to existing LSI support contracts on the CTS2600 (price hikes)

The MSA P2000 G3 from HP looks to match the 2600 quite well and has [URL="http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA0-7781ENW.pdf"
]Remote Snap[/URL] (PDF) for iSCSI or FC.
 
s0ck said:
http://www.zfsbuild.com/

A spec'd up SuperMicro chassis with 12 * 2TB SATA is around 4k. The equivalent Dell PS SAN has a list of 33k. You will need the paid version of NexentaStor for replication.
Click to expand...

The list price means nothing with the Dell kit, we bought two PS4000s loaded out with 500GB SATA and two PS6000s loaded with 300GB 6gbit SAS. The 4000s came in around the 9k mark and the 6000s came in around 14k. That was on 4 units, if you order 10+ you can get better pricing than that.
They're not the cheapest but...33k for a PS4000 is laughable.
 
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ooo thanks for all the suggestions, i'll investigate them all thoroughly before we make a final decision on which one to get :)
 
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