Cheap iSCSI Storage

Spammeh

Spammeh

Spammeh

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Guys & Gals,

We're looking at getting some cheap iSCSI storage for our DR site, not that bothered about having SAS disks, SATA will be fine but it must do the following:

- VMWare compatible - This will be its main use
- Ideally thin provisioning
- RAID5 or above
- Capable of a 14TB+ capacity

The main use for this will be to create volumes for virtual machines, so need something with enough throughput to host quite a few machines (talking around 10-12)

I've seen the Thecus N12000V & Drobo B800i, but are these capable of handing this many servers?

Budget wise, we need to be spending around £5k, nothing more with it being non-live servers

Any suggestions?
 
Look at the Qnap boxes...something like the TS-809U-RP/16TB....thats ISCI and has Thin Provisioning. Roughly about £2500exVAT for 16TB.

Allthough working for an IT supplier, I could probably get it even cheaper than that.

I think they are SATA only...but are decent units for the price according to some of my clients.
 
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topher said:
http://www.nexsan.com/

they are cheap from what I hear
Click to expand...

They are, very. However do not use it with iSCSI, it's CPU driven and performance is appalling. Over FC it's adequate enough, though I wouldn't use it for virtualisation (that is to say, I've seen it tried and I wouldn't want to again).

My impression is your requirements are a little moon on a stick, 10-12 machines, 14 TB and RAID5 for £5k is going to end up very slow.

Even on FC, we had a Nexsan with 14 SAS drives in RAID6 and it couldn't really keep with that kind of load to our satisfaction.

Hint: It's never about throughput, it's about IOPS...
 
We ended up getting the Qnap, thanks guys. Most of the servers will be rarely used and as long as it can keep up with the load on the rare occasion that its required, then thats fine
 
bigredshark said:
They are, very. However do not use it with iSCSI, it's CPU driven and performance is appalling. Over FC it's adequate enough, though I wouldn't use it for virtualisation (that is to say, I've seen it tried and I wouldn't want to again).
Click to expand...

BRS, able to give any indication on price as I am finding difficulty without applying for a quote. Just want a ball park figure really to know if it is in the area of budget or way over ---> there. The only price I could find listed for the E60X was around 54,000 USD (no mention of populated or not).

Thanks
RB
 
It's been a while but my recollection is we were getting populated SATA beasts for around the £25k mark and SATA boys for less than £10k. It was never my area so I don't know the exact figures or have the quotes, I just saw the aftermath...

Those would be heavily discounted, I suspect list price is 40-50% more than we actually paid. Whether you can argue those kind of levels depends on who you are.

I would also caution that the entire Nexsan range is unsuitable for any project which requires performance or reliability. It's a fabulous archiving solution as it gets you lots of storage in a small space for not much money but that's about all it's good for...
 
bigredshark said:
It's been a while but my recollection is we were getting populated SATA beasts for around the £25k mark and SATA boys for less than £10k. It was never my area so I don't know the exact figures or have the quotes, I just saw the aftermath...

Those would be heavily discounted, I suspect list price is 40-50% more than we actually paid. Whether you can argue those kind of levels depends on who you are.

I would also caution that the entire Nexsan range is unsuitable for any project which requires performance or reliability. It's a fabulous archiving solution as it gets you lots of storage in a small space for not much money but that's about all it's good for...
Click to expand...

I'd 2nd the points on performance but can't say they're unreliable. We've got a pretty big Nexsan estate and they're definately not suitable as tier 1 but looking at cost V rack space, difficult to beat. Up to 180TB in 4U ;)

We had a quote for an E60 (20TB x 2TB SATA) last year and I have a feeling that was around £15K. With the current silly disk prices, a fully loaded E60 (60 x 3TB SATA) must be £60K+. Never had a problem running VMware labs and other VMs (dev only) on both SAS and SATA from SATA/SASBeasts.
 
mole90 said:
I'd 2nd the points on performance but can't say they're unreliable. We've got a pretty big Nexsan estate and they're definately not suitable as tier 1 but looking at cost V rack space, difficult to beat. Up to 180TB in 4U ;)

We had a quote for an E60 (20TB x 2TB SATA) last year and I have a feeling that was around £15K. With the current silly disk prices, a fully loaded E60 (60 x 3TB SATA) must be £60K+. Never had a problem running VMware labs and other VMs (dev only) on both SAS and SATA from SATA/SASBeasts.
Click to expand...

Well ironically I've just had a call from one of our on call guys to say that a controller on one of the SATA beasts has just fallen over and died AGAIN (that'll be 3 times this year now). We operate three SAN vendors in our estate and have about 11PB of SAN space - Nexsan are by an order of magnitude the least reliable. From memory we have had around a dozen serious faults (that is, storage offline) in the last year and a half or so, all software interestingly. Compared to a single motherboard failure on a Netapp filer and not a thing from our HDS arrays in the same period

We chucked out our SAS beasts which were running virtualisation in favour of HDS because they caused us so many problems. We eventually chucked them from the Dev platforms too - example being, if we needed to reform the cluster and start up the 150 or so VMs on there, it took around 2 hours on iSCSI because the storage couldn't deal with the IO. Move to FC and it took about 45 minutes. Move to HDS and it took less than 10 minutes. In comparison, HDS was less than twice the price, which made it a bargain in our view.

I can't question the value proposition and I think they're great archive storage but they have reliability issues, there's no way we've been that unlucky. That's not a compromise I can deal with, I don't mind cheap and slow, you know what you're getting then, cheap and unreliable is a different thing though.

I will say we use storage in a different league to most people and our UAT platforms are probably bigger and higher end than most peoples production systems but my experience has been Nexsan have issues (and as a vendor their support isn't exactly stunning either) so I wouldn't use them for anything other than archival storage myself.

The density may be useful but these days you're paying for power more than physical rack space so it's somewhat irrelevant for me at least.
 
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