Openfiler vs real SAN's

DR-BLOX

DR-BLOX

DR-BLOX

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7 Oct 2010
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So, I did an interesting experiment the other day... and I thought I would share...

Ive been after a home SAN for quite a while and have seen that even the cheap-ish ones have rubbish performance..

I.e an £8000 thecus or a £6000 ReadyNas will still only push through about 130-150MB/s.

I knocked up an openfiler installation, on a cheap HP server with a RAID card, with 4 velociraptors in RAID5, I was getting transfers of up to 170MB/s sustained and around 230-240MB/s for large 6 and 12GB files.

I couldnt believe it. Even the £31,000 Dells we have at work are only throughputting say 470MB/s.

Anyone else got any SAN throughput figures? The performance really took my by surprise, and next up I think I will start bonding NICS to increase the peformance further.

Impressed to say the least!

Its just a shame Openfiler doesnt have a nice interface and performance stats like the Equallogic kit.
 
Yeah, we have a customer running 2x Dell R510's in an Openfiler cluster for VMware - it was set up by Openfiler and is supported by them, we have had no issues so far and it's been in ~5 months now. I'm actually going down to the customers site on Monday to add two more VM host machines :)

I've heard a few people on here say they wouldn't touch it in a production environment but it's horses for courses, this project didn't need a 20K+ SAN so Openfiler fitted the bill nicely - any changes that need doing we simply give them a call and it's usually completed within 2hrs.
 
Kona* said:
I've heard a few people on here say they wouldn't touch it in a production environment but it's horses for courses, this project didn't need a 20K+ SAN so Openfiler fitted the bill nicely - any changes that need doing we simply give them a call and it's usually completed within 2hrs.
Click to expand...

I think thats the key thing to remember, bang for buck sure you max out a server and gain great results, what you dont have is redundancy, availability, scalability etc... all those great marketing terms which we know and love.
 
We're running openfiler in a production environment, but it was only a stop-gap to see us up and running between financial years (so I we have to go over budget on yearly spend).

It's been a fantastic little platform for the outlay, but I wouldn't want it here long-term.
 
we are running openfiler as well and the only issue we have is with samba shares and w2k8 R2 authentication servers.
Downside on openfiler is that there is no roadmap and the last release is now nearly over a year ago.
 
so ive been looking into making a SAN for a while, one that has caught my eye for performance is using ZFS on openSolaris, has anyone tried this at all?

Regards Sam
 
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