Hi All,
I started a new company 8 months ago and have been attempting to clean up the infrastructure that has been left unwell for a long time that's a long story but I'm interested in people's opinions on the MS Storsimple 8000 device.
We have one, it seems the company originally had a 7000 series which died (dual controller failure) and 3 disks all at once (really?!) anyway they had not renewed MS support for this device so MS spent 3 weeks getting the file data back for the company (the disks apparently took 2 weeks to arrive from the US) and recommended going to an 8000 device. This cost the company a small fortune, they had to pay up the 2 years of support + a new 8000 device, it was in the region of 70k
I joined the company as infrastructure manager in April and it seems the person here before me had attempted to move absolutely everything into Azure, I would say it was in a 40/60 split 60 up in cloud (VM's / file data and services) hmm I thought.
When I opened up the Azure portal for the first time I had never seen such a mess and bunch of random stuff in all my IT career! I have spent the last 5 months cleaning it up, the bill was something like 22k a month. Keep in mind they had a reasonably under used Hyper-V cluster in the comms room. This has also been setup without MPIO and other requirements to make it healthy. The Azure bill is now 3.5k a month (everything I deleted wasn't even in use!) I migrated most VM's in azure back onprem using Veeam (lovely product)
Anyway onto the actual point of this thread, I don't do storsimples, don't like them, don't know a lot about them but today I find out that if we lose our internet connection (its decent 300 up down) then we lose access to all our file data on the Storsimple....? This is crazy even if its stored locally on the device, MS also cannot tell me where my data actually is...is it on the local device or is it in the cloud? or both, they have no clue and say no tool exists to tell me.
The device has ISCSI setup on both ports on different VLANS and is connected to a virtual file server (when I first started they didn't even have this setup for multi pathing correctly!) The only bit I do like is mounting clones of the data from the azure portal, its quick to mount up a clone or backup of the current volume and copy data where you need it.
What are peoples recommendations to move away from this to something else, all in all we only have 12TB of data and the 8000 series can hold a huge amount more then that, its over kill in that sense but I also do not like the fact that if we lost internet connectivity we lose access to our file shares, the storsimple expert also said that if the internet line is slow for whatever reason, over utilised for example it will effect file share connectivity locally!
What would you swap this storsimple out with? how would you do it? I need to consider a DR site at some point as well to replicate this file data too, its all well and good being in Azure but 1. its too expensive 2. the business I'm in is a retail business, they do not like monthly bills. 3. I feel out of control with the file data up in azure or on this device.
any recommendations would be appreciated.
EDIT - Also we do have a SAN already for the hyper-v enviroment and Oracle enviroment, this is a netapp 3220 but its EOL in 12 months or so and doesn't have more then around 4TB free on each aggregate, so ideally I need to replace this as well!
I started a new company 8 months ago and have been attempting to clean up the infrastructure that has been left unwell for a long time that's a long story but I'm interested in people's opinions on the MS Storsimple 8000 device.
We have one, it seems the company originally had a 7000 series which died (dual controller failure) and 3 disks all at once (really?!) anyway they had not renewed MS support for this device so MS spent 3 weeks getting the file data back for the company (the disks apparently took 2 weeks to arrive from the US) and recommended going to an 8000 device. This cost the company a small fortune, they had to pay up the 2 years of support + a new 8000 device, it was in the region of 70k
I joined the company as infrastructure manager in April and it seems the person here before me had attempted to move absolutely everything into Azure, I would say it was in a 40/60 split 60 up in cloud (VM's / file data and services) hmm I thought.
When I opened up the Azure portal for the first time I had never seen such a mess and bunch of random stuff in all my IT career! I have spent the last 5 months cleaning it up, the bill was something like 22k a month. Keep in mind they had a reasonably under used Hyper-V cluster in the comms room. This has also been setup without MPIO and other requirements to make it healthy. The Azure bill is now 3.5k a month (everything I deleted wasn't even in use!) I migrated most VM's in azure back onprem using Veeam (lovely product)
Anyway onto the actual point of this thread, I don't do storsimples, don't like them, don't know a lot about them but today I find out that if we lose our internet connection (its decent 300 up down) then we lose access to all our file data on the Storsimple....? This is crazy even if its stored locally on the device, MS also cannot tell me where my data actually is...is it on the local device or is it in the cloud? or both, they have no clue and say no tool exists to tell me.
The device has ISCSI setup on both ports on different VLANS and is connected to a virtual file server (when I first started they didn't even have this setup for multi pathing correctly!) The only bit I do like is mounting clones of the data from the azure portal, its quick to mount up a clone or backup of the current volume and copy data where you need it.
What are peoples recommendations to move away from this to something else, all in all we only have 12TB of data and the 8000 series can hold a huge amount more then that, its over kill in that sense but I also do not like the fact that if we lost internet connectivity we lose access to our file shares, the storsimple expert also said that if the internet line is slow for whatever reason, over utilised for example it will effect file share connectivity locally!
What would you swap this storsimple out with? how would you do it? I need to consider a DR site at some point as well to replicate this file data too, its all well and good being in Azure but 1. its too expensive 2. the business I'm in is a retail business, they do not like monthly bills. 3. I feel out of control with the file data up in azure or on this device.
any recommendations would be appreciated.
EDIT - Also we do have a SAN already for the hyper-v enviroment and Oracle enviroment, this is a netapp 3220 but its EOL in 12 months or so and doesn't have more then around 4TB free on each aggregate, so ideally I need to replace this as well!
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