Want to build a cheap SAN

steinooo

steinooo

steinooo

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Hi all,

I want to build a SAN on the cheap (possibly Openfiler etc), I have a HP ML-370 G3 which has 6 drive bays, and a few HP DL-360 G3s which have 2 drive bays.

I'm happy to spend some money, but wondered if anyone thought of any ideas to make use of the above kit?

I could do with a couple of TB storage. Has anyone created a cheap SAN in the past who could provide me with a few tips?:)
 
The drive bays on the ML370 G3 are SCSI.

The largest SCSI HDs I've seen are 300GB, so you could get 1.8TB raw storage out of that. You get can 300GB drives for around £285+VAT (with the HP Universal caddy).

Wildcard - flog what you have and put the money towards something newer that will take SAS/SATA drives?
 
Thanks Chri5, Quite expensive drives those! Although would a) fit and b) give the correct amount of storage if I bought enough.

Have you ever used openfiler? I plan to get a software product to copy my virtual machines from one site to another out of hours :)

Wildcard - tried flogging them and they're worth the square root of diddly unfortunately! Hence I wanted to try and use them for brownie points. If I did spend cash though (as cheap as poss) what would you recommend out of interest?
 
There's not a huge market for U320 SCSI drives these days. Mind you, don't look at the price of 1TB or 2TB HP SATA/SAS drives. Over £400 for a 2TB SAS.

I've not used OpenFiler.

If you're looking for iSCSI support at a price , then there's quite a choice these days of NAS appliances which support it eg:

Iomega StorCenter
Thecus
QNap
NetGear ReadyNAS
 
have a look at the XVS iSCSI SAN solution, turns each node it a mirror of the other giving shared HA storage, its free btw but unsupported as XVS were bought and almalgamated into another company.
Ive used the XVS solution to run production VM's at remote sites, good throughput and simple, just runs and runs.
 
kipper, thanks for that, I did sneak a peek in a thread about that on here. I can't get my head around the advantage of having a virtual SAN over using the disks as a plain datastore?
 
#Chri5# said:
There's not a huge market for U320 SCSI drives these days. Mind you, don't look at the price of 1TB or 2TB HP SATA/SAS drives. Over £400 for a 2TB SAS.

I've not used OpenFiler.

If you're looking for iSCSI support at a price , then there's quite a choice these days of NAS appliances which support it eg:

Iomega StorCenter
Thecus
QNap
NetGear ReadyNAS
Click to expand...

Just had a think about £400 for a 2TB SAS drive, and actually that's not that bad is it really. It at least means if I acquired one of the HP servers with 4/6 2.5" bays on it, I wouldn't need to buy a separate storage solution.

You've got a good point re: NAS....solution I'd thought about is to buy a fairly big NAS like one of the ones you mention, and use that as a datastore in VM, bonding 2 x 1Gb ports together on the back of the NAS. Although can't get my head around what sort of IOPS that'd deliver ESXi compared to putting say 6 x 2TB 7.5k SAS drives directly in a server.
 
DL380 G5 : 8 x 500GB SAS/SATA 7.2k rpm SFF (2.5") or 8 x 600GB 10k SAS SFF, though HP only offer up to 300GB 10k officially. Hence you'd need to buy OEM drives and caddies to stick them in.

2TB are 3.5" LFF only.
 
#Chri5# said:
DL380 G5 : 8 x 500GB SAS/SATA 7.2k rpm SFF (2.5") or 8 x 600GB 10k SAS SFF, though HP only offer up to 300GB 10k officially. Hence you'd need to buy OEM drives and caddies to stick them in.

2TB are 3.5" LFF only.
Click to expand...

LOL! didn't know you could do that with unofficial drives and caddys!

thanks mate :) just had a look around and the DL180 is looking pretty good if i'm going to have to spend money, it has 14 LFF bays = pretty much win
 
If you look on a certain auction site, you can find HP drive trays very cheap and then stuff OEM drives in them. On some drives you not only save money but get a better warranty as HP only give a 1 year warranty on 7.2k rpm midline/nearline HDs.

Watch out which model DL180 you are looking at. Some models only have 4 or 8 HD bays as standard. You can upgrade a 4 bay model to an 8 bay but you might need to change the Smart Array RAID controller. I had a P212 (462834-B21) which only has 1 internal port and the 8 bay needs 2 internal SAS ports, so I got a P410 (462864-B21).

I don't think you can get the parts to field upgrade an 4 or 8 bay to 12 bay - you have to buy with 12 bays out of the factory.

To get 14 LFF bays, you have to buy an option kit which puts two HDs at the back of the server instead of some expansion slots.
 
thanks for that, certainly you know your HP kit!

Would you think a similarly specced DL180 G6 would provide enough grunt to host what a DL380 G5 is doing at present? this would only be for DR purposes not production.
 
I don't see why not.

The off-the-shelf 12 bay models are Xeon E5520 or better CPUs, so CPU performance should be the same.
 
what do you think about the performance I'd get by putting the virtual machines on for example an 8 bay SATA NFS NAS compared to having them on the local disks in the server?
 
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