Want to build a cheap SAN

steinooo

steinooo

steinooo

Soldato
Joined
31 Dec 2003
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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?:)
 
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?
 
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.
 
#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
 
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.
 
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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