Cheap low cost bulk storage.

MasterPlan1 · 11 Apr 2013 at 11:58

Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions for big bulk storage, as we have lots of designers which need to keep old projects etc on hand, but don't necessarily need to be on our main expensive SAN, and can be homed off somewhere else...

I was thinking of building a big box of 20 disks using a Norco and putting FreeNAS on there, but my boss didn't like the idea of being unsupported... If storage spaces were a bit more mature, I'd also suggest that. Or maybe even just building a straight up windows box with lots of storage.

Anyone else got any ideas? Ideally a big NAS with iSCSI, or a DIY box with an OS where we can get pay-by-case support.

enigmo · 11 Apr 2013 at 15:09

How about a half-way house? Your own homebuilt box with some proper, corporate supported DAS boxes. e.g. A micro tower with a couple of SAS cards in it presenting a Dell MD1000 or summint.

DRZ · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:07

What sort of budget do you have? I have recently been quoted for a NexSAN box, 70TB useable in 4U which came in at under £20k.

Decided not to go down that route in the end but that's pretty interesting for unimportant storage.

RSR · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:16

Its completely depending on budget, as DRZ as said.

I'd recommend looking at the NetApp 2200 series on the low end, as its fully scalable up to 432TB.

DRZ · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:31

A NetApp will be more expensive per TB and offer little extra other than deduplication for this sort of use.

The rival NetApp quote was £10k more than the NetApp quote for "only" 40TB useable, although comparable for us after we take deduplication into account.

RSR · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:35

DRZ said:
A NetApp will be more expensive per TB and offer little extra other than deduplication for this sort of use.

The rival NetApp quote was £10k more than the NetApp quote for "only" 40TB useable, although comparable for us after we take deduplication into account.

NetApp pricing I have noticed, is very dependent on the calender month / quarter. If you time it correctly you can get some very good deals from them. We at the moment use Dell / EMC storage and I really don't a good word to say about it but that's just from personal experience.

#Chri5# · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:53

The way I read the OP suggests the budget is way under £20k.

You can buy a 16 bay 3U QNAP NAS box with 16 x Seagate Constellation 2TB drives for £4.5k ex VAT or £51.k with 3TB drives.

RSR · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:55

#Chri5# said:
The way I read the OP suggests the budget is way under £20k.

You can buy a 16 bay 3U QNAP NAS box with 16 x Seagate Constellation 2TB drives for £4.5k ex VAT or £51.k with 3TB drives.

That maybe true.

That brings me on to another question really. What level of SLA is the OP looking for as that's going to have a big factor on the costs.

#Chri5# · 11 Apr 2013 at 16:55

{Edit}

My post above was meant to say the QNAP is different world from a NetApp but horses for courses (especially if it's just an archive dump).

DRZ · 12 Apr 2013 at 10:17

[RXP]Andy;24101557 said:
NetApp pricing I have noticed, is very dependent on the calender month / quarter. If you time it correctly you can get some very good deals from them. We at the moment use Dell / EMC storage and I really don't a good word to say about it but that's just from personal experience.

Having spent something like a million quid on NetApp stuff I'm gonna agree with you on that!

I'm not going to discuss the sort of discounting I see because that's not fair but our account manager tells us that NetApp are changing the way they price their lower-end models so that people aren't put off by the ludicrous list prices before they have managed to get through to some discounted pricing...

MasterPlan1 · 12 Apr 2013 at 10:46

We currently have HP left-hand stuff, a 12tb node comes in at like 6k, so anything under that which is why I was thinking Norco + disks and a controller... As from rough calcs using WD Reds I could build a box with lots of storage for a couple of k. Especially because its just a dump and store box...

DRZ · 12 Apr 2013 at 11:13

Have you seen the BackBlaze design? Might be worth a read:

http://blog.backblaze.com/category/storage-pod/

MasterPlan1 · 12 Apr 2013 at 14:17

I think we're going to go with a couple of QNap 8 disk Pro jobbies, load them up with 8x2Tb WD Reds - they're only going to be used for DFS Replicas for DR\backup purposes and the previously mentioned dump drives for designers, it seems like a happy median between a home built and a off the shelf solution.

Caged · 14 Apr 2013 at 18:23

Dell and HP both do cheap units based on Windows Storage server, they are worth a look for stuff you aren't bothered about being available all the time.

ASE001 · 15 Apr 2013 at 10:44

You could go for a system running OpenSolaris, using the ZFS file system you can use cheap RAID'd SATA drives for bulk storage. Add a sizable SSD as a cache drive and you have the best of both worlds, cheap and reasonable performance. Also ZFS makes use of system memory so you get another kick in performance if you have the max system memory your budget will allow.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html

I've never setup OpenSolaris but I've read some white papers while configuring my NAS4FREE server to use ZFS. ZFS was invented/developed by SUN and is mainstream on SUN/Oracle systems. My NAS4FREE server works a treat with ZFS, RAID'd SATA drives and a 128Gbyte SSD.

RSR · 15 Apr 2013 at 11:56

ASE001 said:
You could go for a system running OpenSolaris, using the ZFS file system you can use cheap RAID'd SATA drives for bulk storage. Add a sizable SSD as a cache drive and you have the best of both worlds, cheap and reasonable performance. Also ZFS makes use of system memory so you get another kick in performance if you have the max system memory your budget will allow.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/overview/index.html

I've never setup OpenSolaris but I've read some white papers while configuring my NAS4FREE server to use ZFS. ZFS was invented/developed by SUN and is mainstream on SUN/Oracle systems. My NAS4FREE server works a treat with ZFS, RAID'd SATA drives and a 128Gbyte SSD.

Opensolaris has been discontinued now, as its direct replacement would be Solaris 11.1 Express. However, I wouldn't recommend using Solaris 11.1 in a commercial environment without a support contract.

Open Indiana is technically now the open source version but its now based on the Illumos kernel.