External Storage Options

Deathwish

Deathwish

Deathwish

Soldato
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With HP having switched to 2.5" drives for most if not all of the ProLiant server range I have come across a small problemo. Requirement for a server with lots of storage, only problem is that it needs to be a tower server (No space for a rack).

ML 370 would fit the bill but even if you load it up with 16x 146Gb SAS disks, that's not a lot of space. What I would ideally like is an external tower StorageArray (MSA).

Anyone have any tips on how I can overcome this, or advice?

Cheers
 
Deathwish said:
With HP having switched to 2.5" drives for most if not all of the ProLiant server range I have come across a small problemo. Requirement for a server with lots of storage, only problem is that it needs to be a tower server (No space for a rack).

ML 370 would fit the bill but even if you load it up with 16x 146Gb SAS disks, that's not a lot of space. What I would ideally like is an external tower StorageArray (MSA).

Anyone have any tips on how I can overcome this, or advice?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Unsurprisingly, HP don't do an external storage array which isn't rack mountable.

You don't say what you need it for, if you need something fast then you have little option but to buy a SAS attached MSA of some kind and just dump it next to your server (it'll encourage you to buy a half rack).

If speed isn't a concern, there are some good desktop eSATA arrays around these days, get one from a reputable vendor and you should be good.
 
bigredshark said:
Unsurprisingly, HP don't do an external storage array which isn't rack mountable.

You don't say what you need it for, if you need something fast then you have little option but to buy a SAS attached MSA of some kind and just dump it next to your server (it'll encourage you to buy a half rack).

If speed isn't a concern, there are some good desktop eSATA arrays around these days, get one from a reputable vendor and you should be good.
Click to expand...

Seconded
//TrX
 
It's for extra storage at a School (They have an ML350). Rack is never going to be an option as there is barely space for a server! :)
 
Deathwish said:
It's for extra storage at a School (They have an ML350). Rack is never going to be an option as there is barely space for a server! :)
Click to expand...

There is always space for a sneaky rack.. do you really need that table your kettle coffee and cups sit on, or what about the desk that has the servers screen / keyboard on it... Half height racks for the win :P

//TrX
 
LordSplodge said:
Tower Server + RAID on-board + Couple of NICS + OpenFiler and it will work as a intelligent SAN (iSCSI support) supporting up to 60TB

http://www.openfiler.com/

The software is Open Source so free and very good.
Click to expand...

Doesn't help much without the disks though, unless you buy some cheap case and build your own box which can take 10 1TB SATA drives. Don't do that, it's cheap and nasty and not a good idea for business...
 
bigredshark said:
Doesn't help much without the disks though, unless you buy some cheap case and build your own box which can take 10 1TB SATA drives. Don't do that, it's cheap and nasty and not a good idea for business...
Click to expand...

You can buy tower servers with plenty of drive bays and hardware RAID that will take SATA or SAS drives. Combine that with OpenFiler and it will give you reliable SAN storage.

I wouldn't advocate cheap and nasty own build hardware but I have no problem with Open Source software in the Enterprise.
 
LordSplodge said:
You can buy tower servers with plenty of drive bays and hardware RAID that will take SATA or SAS drives. Combine that with OpenFiler and it will give you reliable SAN storage.

I wouldn't advocate cheap and nasty own build hardware but I have no problem with Open Source software in the Enterprise.
Click to expand...

I don't providing it's the best available solution but openfiler isn't very fast and you've got zero support to fall back on. If you can't buy support services then it's not even in consideration for me...
 
Support is a must really in our environment. When you are supporting many varieties of equipment and platforms it is necessary to have someone to call on, especially for hardware failures which in some cases need 4 hour response times :)
 
Also, the DIY approach with cheap 1TB HDD's will not just be slow at the OS level, but seek times on the disks will be pretty bad too, double the disks at half the space per disk if you did go down this route.
*hopes you don't :P

//TrX
 
Shaz]sigh[;11816721 said:
C3000 tower with a load of storage blades? :D

More likely a NetApp StoreVault S300
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Yay to this man. Go with a tower c3000, stick a Bl460 (or 2) in there. The add in some SB40's or the SB600 all in one for your storage. If you get the tower model then they are designed to plug in to standard 13amp wall sockets. Or you could get the baby 14U rack and get the c3000 racked version.

However this will still not give you a huge amount of storage as all of these are still using the 2.5" SFF drives.

If you manage to look at a rack, you could get the 14U one, then you might as well just stick an msa 60 attached to a rack ML370 (if you're not worried about space).

One thing to beware of. The ML370 takes 16 drives, but only with the addition of the 2nd drive cage and a 2nd controller in the server. The cages are seen as two seperate pools of storage and you need your O/S to span to them if you want one huge LUN.

If you went MSA 60 these use the LFF 3.5" drives and they now have the 1TB SATA drives available for them so you can get 12tb in one shelf. Another point to note though is that SATA drives only have 1 year warranty as opposed to 3 years like the rest of the kit. So you might want to look at the MSA 70 and you can cascade a couple of shelves together (this can be done with 60 or 70) to increase your storage space when neeeded.
 
That StoreVault S300 looks like a nice bit of kit. If not for this project, im sure it would fit somewhere else ;)

Origin: Yep, I am aware of the ML370, just putting 6 of them in with the second drive cage (arriving on tuesday, woot!).

SATA is good for less mission critical stuff, can you extend the warranty on them like other HP kit?
 
Update on this.

ML350 G5 is available in 3.5 LFF disk configuration according to my reseller, so you can put 6 LFF SAS/SATA disks in there.

:)
 
Deathwish said:
Update on this.

ML350 G5 is available in 3.5 LFF disk configuration according to my reseller, so you can put 6 LFF SAS/SATA disks in there.

:)
Click to expand...

Yes you can. 6 x LFF SAS drives @ 300GB each, or 6 x LFF SATA @750GB each. Make sure you get the E200 w/128MB cache at least or the server won't do raid 5 (if you need it) Try and get the LFF Top Value model if you can which will come with that cache module already. Wouldn't recommend using SATA if this is a fairly intense environment, especially as all of the SATA drives only have one year warranty no matter what the server has.... :)

Mind me asking who your reseller is?
 
I would say the E200 is a minimum, like the P400 myself although the P800s that I have just put in an ML370 are nice :)

300Gb SAS would be enough room I would hope! Although to be honest SATA in this situation wouldn't be a problem (Primary School, backed up each night).

Computacenter was the reseller for this.
 
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