I think i need a SAN - help required!

feenster99

feenster99

feenster99

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Hi all,
I have a project at work that requires a good wedge of storage space. Currently, we need around ~3TB, but i anticipate this will need to grow rapidly, somewhere up to 9 or 10TB in the near future, and further on from there.

Currently, we're using an Adaptec PCIe card with 500GB drives. The downside is that to add a new drive means taking the server offline (whilst i e2fsck and resize the partition in Linux) and we're limited to 8 or 16 drives depending on what card we get. Therefore, i think i might need a SAN, but have no experience of them.

Can anyone give me a rough idea of how much a SAN might cost with 8-10TB of storage, and whether it would suit my requirements?

Matt
 
Are you sure it's a SAN you need? A SAN is for attaching a big whack of storage to a server over IP so it appears and acts as a local disk (you can also find this referred to as DAS Direct Attached Sotrage but not necessarily over IP). A NAS or fileserver is for multiple users accessing files. So your SAN can be part of a NAS.

I don't know about enterprise storage servers so I'd just assuem you'd go to your account manager with Dell, HP or whoever your company buys from.
 
If you can plump for a NetApp unit, I really recommend them. Very feature filled, very quick, and easy to manage to boot :D.

I dont know what sort of data you'll be storing, but the netapp has support for well.. everything. Snapshots are really nice if its data thats changed, they've got a really clever technology behind that, for example we snapshot user's home folders once an hour, which means when they accidentdally delete all their work, they just pull up a previous version using windows explorer. Its also got iSCSI support, which is ace for things like VMWare/Databases. It also supports CIFS/NFS etc. NetApp support is awesome too, which is a big requirement for work stuffs.

2 Shelves of 14x 500gb Sata disks, and a head unit should do you for ~12tb useable, 4 disks for Parity, 2 hot spares etc. Im also pretty sure you can add further trays of disks without downtime; our unit has been running for around 500days without so much as a blip, even when directly attaching a scsi tape unit to it. It will set you back a few pennies though, probably £40k+.

AbsenceJam said:
Are you sure it's a SAN you need? A SAN is for attaching a big whack of storage to a server over IP so it appears and acts as a local disk (you can also find this referred to as DAS Direct Attached Sotrage but not necessarily over IP). A NAS or fileserver is for multiple users accessing files. So your SAN can be part of a NAS.
I don't know about enterprise storage servers so I'd just assuem you'd go to your account manager with Dell, HP or whoever your company buys from.
Click to expand...

The Idea behind a SAN, is that multiple sets of disks/arrays can be presented by a single presence (server or cluster). It also allows Backup devices, mirrored disks etc to talk without impacting the user facing network. Hence the term, Storage Area Network.
 
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Hi,
Thanks for the reply. It looks like i don't need a SAN then. The Netapp stuff looks good, but £40K is excessive for what i need. I guess until the project is really rolling, i'm going to have to go for something like 16 port RAID card, with a bunch of 1TB drives. The downtime resizing them is a killer, but if i pick a different filesystem under Linux, this might be cut down slightly.

Is it possible to just get a rack mount drive caddy that connects to the server via iSCSI or similar? So in effect you'd have a rack server with a bunch of rack mounted disks beneath it. What sort of pricing would I be looking at for something of this type? (or is this exactly what SAN's are :S)

Matt
 
There is a british company that does iSCSI storage units, but you can equally build your own. Dell do them too. Its just a server with a lot of disks offering its storage via iSCSI and not CIFS/NFS for example.

Nothing to it really....
 
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