Quick iSCSI question
- Thread starter mosfet
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Funny you mention Fibre Channel, they did actually get a quote recently for an FC setup which was massively overspecced and way out of their budget. They don't need speed at all, just a central, idiotproof box to dump their clients' data incase some numpty drops a drive or kicks over a workstation.
I looked in to Drobo failure horror stories, and AFAIK provided you transplant the drives in to another Drobo with the same or newer firmware then you're fine. Personally I'd want a pair of them on a UPS, with one providing nightly backups of the other.
Because Drobo had already caught my eye and the company already had a robust gigabit-switched network running to every room.
I looked in to Drobo failure horror stories, and AFAIK provided you transplant the drives in to another Drobo with the same or newer firmware then you're fine. Personally I'd want a pair of them on a UPS, with one providing nightly backups of the other.
Because Drobo had already caught my eye and the company already had a robust gigabit-switched network running to every room.
This is exactly why for small setups, I wouldn't bother with proprietary hardware RAID where if the controller fails you need to get another one before you can recover data. Hook everything up to a generic x86 box as single drives and soft-raid it with LVM or ZFS and if the host goes bang, you can run the same drives on a completely different box running the same (free) software. If you need performance, that's a different story, but then you've probably got $$$ to throw around.
That's why I started this thread
This is exactly the route I wanted to take, but for a company with no technical staff *at all* it seemed that the chance of me getting a phone call every week because they can't figure out how to do something was a little too high. Something like a Drobo is tempting because even the people there would understand "Green Light = Good, Red Light = Put a new drive in".
I havent seen the new OpenStorage kit, but I do have an X4250 with the full compliment of disks (so same hardware) running ESXi for a DR box.
I also just got a Sun StorageTek 2510 iSCSI box and several X4440 boxes.
All of it is awesome kit, the performance and quality is second to none
That's why I started this thread
This is exactly the route I wanted to take, but for a company with no technical staff *at all* it seemed that the chance of me getting a phone call every week because they can't figure out how to do something was a little too high. Something like a Drobo is tempting because even the people there would understand "Green Light = Good, Red Light = Put a new drive in".
Would a standard Drobo with network adaptor give you enough storage?
Got a Sun 7110 on order at the moment. Just waiting for confirmation of when it's going to be delivered! Once I've got it setup (along with Citrix XenServer Enterprise and a load of new Sun Fire X4150's
) I'll get some information up on what it's like to use etc Neither enough space nor enough speed, they don't need lightning fast FC access, but the drobo adaptor is supposed to have abysmal performance.
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Sounds like what you want is a box that you can just dump files to and use as a central repository/backup device.
To be honest if budget is THAT important you could probably build a box fairly cheaply with sata drives and dump FreeNAS on it. Then take your pick of iSCSI/FTP/SMB. Plus it's reallllllly simple to set up using web interface so any newb could make simple changes like adding shares/user accounts. Ideal ifthey have no tech support.
It's not the most bullet proof solution but it's cheap, and you'll at least have RAID level redundancy and the ability to backup all the data fairly easily.
What sort of data quantities are we talking here?
To be honest if budget is THAT important you could probably build a box fairly cheaply with sata drives and dump FreeNAS on it. Then take your pick of iSCSI/FTP/SMB. Plus it's reallllllly simple to set up using web interface so any newb could make simple changes like adding shares/user accounts. Ideal ifthey have no tech support.
It's not the most bullet proof solution but it's cheap, and you'll at least have RAID level redundancy and the ability to backup all the data fairly easily.
What sort of data quantities are we talking here?
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Got a Sun 7110 on order at the moment. Just waiting for confirmation of when it's going to be delivered! Once I've got it setup (along with Citrix XenServer Enterprise and a load of new Sun Fire X4150's
The question we're wanting answered is whether you can expand the storage beyond 2tb with a second/third rack of disks. The 2tb is too small, but I think the next one up is more like 20k.
and to throw my hat into the OP's actual question/issue.... my 0.02 is that this company needs far more than a SAN or any other device for data consolidation. What they really need is a slap. Start by throwing one of their USB disk under a bus and see if the cry lol. They wont invest unless they see the issue... and even then it sounds like they have crap all over the shop, probably lots of duplicated data everywhere... yak.
There's a 4tb version due out soon, and the second generation (due out 3Q or 4Q this year) is supposed to have a JBOD unit that can be attached to allow for expansion.
I asked our Sun guy the same question - initially we were told Sun were releasing the JBOD unit for the 7110 that we've purchased. However it seems that they're not sure now if it's going to be 2nd gen only.
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Actually, disregard this, I'm drunkered.
Thanks for the info. Looks like its not going to be for us then.
We have probably 40tb across around 60 servers in 4 networks (lan, dmz1, dmz2, dr) and are looking to consolidate boxes using esxi (which we already use, but with local storage of images) and to consolidate some storage. We think were going to need multiple SANs eventually, but want to start with the lan as it has the least change. So the one here must be good for around 10tb.