Large cheap Storage unit

malds001 · 18 Dec 2008 at 11:39

Hello first post.

We are a VMware ESX / FC SAN (EMC cx300) house and are struggling with capacity, we moved our file storage onto the SAN, converting our File server into a VM machine. In hindsight this was not wise, we should have kept the SAN for running VMDK's only and simply built / purchased a cheap unit for flat file storage.

My plan over xmass maintenance is to remove .5Tb of space on the SAN used by the file server (contains 7 years of client data) most of which is not accessed and transfer it to a SATA based storage unit, ideally I would only host 1 years of data on the SAN and archive the rest onto SATA however I do not know how to achieve this in such a way that it's simple for the users to locate older archived files.

Another area where I am struggling is the VMDK backups which are huge (ESXRanger), furthermore I would like to use disk based archival instead of tape. Offsite backups are achieved via a WAN link (although it's not wide enough for VMDK's)

I have two options I can buy another 2950 III (£900) add a MD1000 DAS (£3000) unit to it and rack it full of SATA disks, or I can buy a storage enclosure fill it with SATA disks £2000. I am leaning to the home build, the unit is not mission critical.

Down the line I am interested in converting the storage unit, SATA II with 12 spindles is plenty fast, into an ISCSI software SAN using Datacore or LeftHand. I would then build another unit in our second site and use delta level changes to sync the two providing true site disaster recovery, the most expensive thing being the licenses for the SAN.

Edit: Found a place I can buy enclosures and, looking to use http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.php?t=1139 - looks very promising for what we need. Async replication, going to be interesting to test.

Another thread I found for reference: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17941517

morfmedia · 18 Dec 2008 at 17:33

Having played with a lefthand networks VSA appliance, personally I'd buy the hardware as their software offering was roughly equal in cost to a hardware based approach.

I can recommend the IBM DS3300 as an iSCSI array, works well with VMWare as well.

I'd always avoid home builds, it'll always come back to haunt at some point in the future.

If you do want the Lefthand approach, look at the Xtravirt appliance. It does mostly the same thing but for free (you can add on paid support etc)..

Hope this gives you some ideas, I've not answered your questions exactly as I'm exhausted but hopefully it provides some food for thought. Good luck

malds001 · 19 Dec 2008 at 13:21

Thanks for the info, I ended up buying two rack monted cases with 12 1tb drives each, mother boards with onboard gfx and used the pci-e x16 slots for a controller, most expensive parts were the controllers, came in at £1800 each.

2 PCI-e x1 slots for network cards.

Not bad. These things are just big data warehouses, I am sure that come the next audit they will be flagged and money allocated.

Impossible to source server motherboards.

malds001 · 19 Dec 2008 at 13:29

Interesting:

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Darwin: I just wonder, what kind of storage solution that can saturate 10Gb Ethernet backbone. If I assume I have a file server (of course equipped with 10GbE NIC on PCI-E 8x), can an external SAS/SATA-II JBOD box (using 4xwide SAS link) produce enough throughput (taking into account the hard disk speed and the link bandwidth) to saturate the network? If not, where will be the bottleneck? Thanks.

http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/20/bottlenecks-from-disk-to-backbone/

Shaz]sigh[ · 19 Dec 2008 at 13:53

Hi, I skim read your post (so apologies in advance if I've missed the point), but could you not just buy another DAE with 1TB SATA in it and house the file server and esx backups on that?

Or is the issue funding?

malds001 · 19 Dec 2008 at 14:08

1. EMC charge through the nose, sickens me to think we went with one of their products having seen the likes of Equalogic's products. We need an EMC engineer onsite everytime we make a hardware alteration.

2. Would like to try out opensource ISCSI solutions.

Stolly · 19 Dec 2008 at 15:19

malds001 said:
1. EMC charge through the nose, sickens me to think we went with one of their products having seen the likes of Equalogic's products. We need an EMC engineer onsite everytime we make a hardware alteration.

2. Would like to try out opensource ISCSI solutions.

I've done quite a lot with iSCSI and ESX over the last year or two, its certainly viable when done right, and in its place. Wouldn't run a large SQL database off it, but as perhaps a 2nd line storage/archive/backup its great.

I've been looking at Openfiler for iSCSI, not quite managed to convince a customer to use it yet but it looks like it does the trick, and you can't beat the price

Stolly · 19 Dec 2008 at 15:22

malds001 said:
Interesting:

Question to the Storage Advisors, from Darwin: I just wonder, what kind of storage solution that can saturate 10Gb Ethernet backbone. If I assume I have a file server (of course equipped with 10GbE NIC on PCI-E 8x), can an external SAS/SATA-II JBOD box (using 4xwide SAS link) produce enough throughput (taking into account the hard disk speed and the link bandwidth) to saturate the network? If not, where will be the bottleneck? Thanks.

http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/03/20/bottlenecks-from-disk-to-backbone/

Lets put it this way, i've had 300 concurrent Exchange users in a demo evironment (using loadsim) on a 1Gbit iSCSI link and it was using around 10% of the bandwidth.

10Gbit is a monster amount of bandwidth, frankly if you are going to saturate that amount you should be looking at FC anyway imo.