SAN Storage 450TB usable

mattyj1085

mattyj1085

mattyj1085

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Hi,

I need to get some ball park figures for SAN storage that has 450TB usable space comprising of 20TB usable fast SAS 15k disks and 430TB usable of SATA disks.

I know I will be looking in the hundreds of thousands but has anyone had quote for such storage recently so I can get an idea of cost.
 
That's some storage!

Not sure on that scale, but we use EMC SAN's. NX4's which are a few years old now, but you had the option of filling it with fast disks, and then maybe adding a tray of cheaper disks if you wanted.
 
Hellsmk2 said:
Daft question - why would you spend hundreds of grand on a SAN, and then fill it with SATA disks?
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Because it meets his requirements? Storing 430TB of data that doesn't have any high IO requirement on SAS would be ludicrously expensive.

430 (minimum) 1TB SATA spindles would be pretty damn quick anyway... faster than a few SAS configurations to get you to 20TB anyway...
 
We're buying a new SAN at the moment and have picked an EMC VNX5700 - but we have pricing for the 5500 too.

As a very, very, rough outline the list price for a vnx5500 with 25 x 600GB SAS and 150 x 3TB 7.2K drives comes in at £270K.
The offer price, however, is £74K so YMMV.

This is SAN hardware only, so it doesn't include connectivity like fibre switches, or support, installation etc - It was bad enough trying to doing a like-for-like between the competitors.
 
Personally, from what you've said so far I'd suggest you look at nexenta. Dell have just announced a partnership with them, we're looking at using it in a very specific case. There's lots of nexenta UK based retailers which are offering some amazing deals, especially for mass storage.

Edit - to give an idea of costs, a netapp quote for 150TB of fast disk, including support was £600K. £330K just being for the two controller heads. Dell / Nexenta for 200TB was about £180K and unheard of company with 200TB+ was about £150K. Dell and next were just online quotes - we get a good deal off dell. Netapp was an accurate quote.
 
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video data?

Look at Isilon - no need to manage luns/raid groups/file systems, one huge bucket of storage that can grow very efficiently and simply.
 
DiscoDave said:
I think the OP has requested some ball park figures on cost rather than advice on make/model..
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Well, on that note, I logged onto our Dell premier page for the hell of it and knocked up a spec for a SAN based on their MD3200i chassis. Many people will tell you that the PowerVault range aren't true SANS, and Equallogic are the ones to go for, but the PowerVault will come with a warranty and enterprise support from Dell, so at least if cost is an issue you'll have an idea on the cheaper end.

Anyway, the MD3200i with dual controllers (2gb model rather than 4Gb), and 12 x 4TB Near-Line SAS drives (sata's not available) comes out as £8926 ex vat - that's with the basic warranty in place - upgrading to the 3 year next business day is £1400 on top. if you simply went with 12 of those, you'd be spending £107,000.

Of course, however, you could save a bit by buying fewer MD3200i's and instead adding in some disk shelves based on the MD1200. One of those with 12 x 4TB drives (same basic warranty) is £7,149. I believe you can add 3 of those to the MD3200i but I'd need to check. This means you could get the storage you're after at about the £100,000 mark. Of course, an order of that size would qualify for extra discount over the margins in the standard Dell premier account.

So there you go. Not sure how useful that is, but at least there is a semi-accurate ball park figure out there.


EDIT - missed the bit about SAS. The biggest 15k drives Dell do are the 600Gb's and these are £245 each compared to the £443 each on the 4Tb drives. If 10k was an option, the 1.2Tb SAS (10krpm) is £425 so slightly cheaper than the 4Tb Near-line Sas's.
 
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450TB isn't necessarily a huge amount.

The first questions are what does it consist of? If it's one application then that can be easily solved. If it's multiple then the question comes down to performance/cost/service and whether it's really best to have all your eggs in a single basket.

From there you can glean your costs!
 
wasc said:
EDIT - missed the bit about SAS. The biggest 15k drives Dell do are the 600Gb's and these are £245 each compared to the £443 each on the 4Tb drives. If 10k was an option, the 1.2Tb SAS (10krpm) is £425 so slightly cheaper than the 4Tb Near-line Sas's.
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Slightly cheaper, but only provides 1/3 of the storage capacity, so you need 3 of them. :)

Or expressed another way:

4 TB Near-Line SAS = £0.11 / GB
1.2 TB 10k SAS = £0.35 / GB
600 GB 15k SAS = £0.41 / GB

So if the solution is £100k with 4 TB disks, then it is £300k with 1.2 TB disks, and £400k with 600 GB disks.

Very useful info, thanks.
 
A lot of the cost of NetApp etc is the software bundle, if you can do without all the fancy stuff then it shouldn't break the bank. Going off my last purchase, a 72tb (24 x 3tb) shelf for a NetApp 3240 was around 22k plus Vat, a 24tb shelf (24 x 1tb) was 8.5k and a 24 x 450Gb SAS was 10k. Controllers were 3.4k.

Out of a 300k order 60k was software options (cifs, nfs, snap mirror, snap restore, flex clone) 70k was support 4hrx24x7 for 3yrs.
 
You'd never catch me trying to do 450TB with MD3200i units, it would be an unmanageable mess.

I'd look at NetApp and Isilon as mentioned previously.
 
Caged said:
You'd never catch me trying to do 450TB with MD3200i units, it would be an unmanageable mess.

I'd look at NetApp and Isilon as mentioned previously.
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It would be if these were running vmware as you'd end up with lots of datastores spread across multiple SANS. However, this is archived CCTV footage so i suspect that is slightly more manageable.

The MD units are pretty fast too - we've got 800Mb per sec file transfers out of one we've used with only 10 disks in it which is pretty close to maxing out the 8 gigabit ports. Not used the MD3600 series yet as these are 10gigabit. Only drawback with the MD series is it doesn't like resizing volumes.

We have a NetApp FAS2020 San ourselves and we hate it compared to other kit we've used such as Equallogic. It's heavily CPU bound - any load on it and all the CPU's go to 100% - at least on the FAS2020 we've used.
 
2020s are properly ancient and single core. Probably served its useful life now and needs to be retired.
 
I've had quotes back for HP 3Par solutions around 400tB usable around the £450k mark inc all software installation etc.

I am awaiting quotes on the EMC Isilon front but following a call on monday it looks like that's going to come in significantly cheaper and the more I read up on it the better it sounds for our needs.
 
Good, Isilon is ace. Installed a few....

Practically zero management, can scale to Petabytes and it's made for NAS, CCTV, Media, archiving, etc.

You can have a few fast nodes that act as the input and then have a load of the NL nodes (4TB SATA drives). I think they get 120TB usable from an NL nodes (4U) so you can get a load of space in a small footprint.
 
wasc said:
It would be if these were running vmware as you'd end up with lots of datastores spread across multiple SANS. However, this is archived CCTV footage so i suspect that is slightly more manageable.
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Surely for CCTV data you want to deal with one LUN/mount point for want of a better word? You can't do that with the MD-series so to have the capacity you need more than one system, which is more than one system to set permissions on, more than one to patch, and then you get to deal with moving data around when you fill one up because it turns out the way you set the box up wasn't quite suited to the rate you fill them at. That's even assuming the NVR software/appliance lets you pick more than one location to store the data on.
 
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