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While I've not touched the SAN unit you've got there, you thought process is essentially what I would go through were I your place. It's clear MPIO isn't in place, and there may actually be a HP software package for this as well. The physical redundancy sounds right as well, and again I don't know what the HP looks like but if you can make sure you don't have both bits of fiber going from the same PCI card (this is hypothetical I understand the HP is probably not a PCIe card and instead inbuilt) to the same Silkworm I mean Brocade then that would be perfect.
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# ? May 11, 2012 07:57 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 15:40 |
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bull3964 posted:Here's the situation. Yea, you're pretty much on the right path. HP should have a DSM for the MSA array that you install through the MPIO control panel. It's usually a good idea to install the vendor specific DSM instead of using the generic Microsoft one. You'll want to ensure that each server has a connection to each switch, and that each of the two controllers in your SAN has a connection to each switch. You'll also need to log in to your FC switches and see if any zones have been defined, since if they have you will not see the new connections you add until they have been properly zoned.
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# ? May 11, 2012 08:02 |
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Winning tender for our RFT came in at a little over half the price Netapp originally quoted us. (dual 2240, 10GBE, 13 10krpm drives, 24 3TB SATA, all licenses for under 55k).
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# ? May 11, 2012 15:30 |
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I've been pretty annoyed at EMC lately, they've given their sales people access to a warchest and EMC are literally trying to buy customers from us, "selling" equipment for almost nothing. Despite that, we've only lost one minor customer that had a change of the guard and the new IT manager is mates with a local EMC manager.
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# ? May 11, 2012 15:45 |
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Thanks for the feedback everyone. It's nice knowing that you're going down the right path and even nicer to have your suspicions about how incompetently it was setup before confirmed.
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# ? May 11, 2012 15:51 |
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It worked for us. I'm not sure how EMC won over my boss and the storage guy, but we're moving from NetApp to EMC. We bought a couple of VNX5500's at what I hear is a ridiculous discount. I know management was getting annoyed at NetApp's ridiculous maintenance fees as well.
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# ? May 11, 2012 16:03 |
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I've heard that there is special budget inside EMC dedicated to "competitive situations". If sales guy is trying to unseat NetApp he/she can access this budget and get hardware costs super low. Did for us, anyways.
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# ? May 11, 2012 16:28 |
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Is Nimble able to scale out with multiple arrays, or would each array be managed separately? It sounds like they have plans for expansion shelves, have those come out yet?
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# ? May 11, 2012 16:56 |
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complex posted:I've heard that there is special budget inside EMC dedicated to "competitive situations". If sales guy is trying to unseat NetApp he/she can access this budget and get hardware costs super low. Did for us, anyways. EMC isn't much of a technical organization, but they are very good at sales and have enough money coming in from some of their smart purchases (VMware being a big one, but also Data Domain) that they can treat a lot of their storage gear as a loss leader. They've also bought such a dizzying array of products that they have a solution for every use case. It may not be a good solution, but the important thing is that they rarely have to tell a customer "we can't do that". It sucks competing against them because I've never once met a happy EMC customer in all of my years in IT, but they have so much money and so many products and a willingness to lie with abandon that they are very hard to beat.
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# ? May 11, 2012 17:14 |
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It's a double edged sword NippleFloss, I'll often (and I don't use that word lightly) run into situations where a client has bought into the crazy discounted EMC bullshit parade and within a year they are practically knocking down our doors to get us back in there. Also, complex, that's what the warchest I mentioned already is. It's a PITA. I've seen them quote hardware for practically free (ie sub $10k). NetApp need to step up their game in this area. They have the right idea with their challenges but theres just not enough of them nor are the shouted about loudly enough.
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# ? May 11, 2012 18:45 |
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marketingman posted:It's a double edged sword NippleFloss, I'll often (and I don't use that word lightly) run into situations where a client has bought into the crazy discounted EMC bullshit parade and within a year they are practically knocking down our doors to get us back in there. We are in this position right now. We went from Equallogic to 2 EMC VNX 5300s and we absolutely hate them. Their products are crap and their support is crap. My boss is the very definition of passive and checked out, and even he is screaming to get them ripped out and returned.
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# ? May 11, 2012 18:51 |
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HAHA I just had a meeting with my team lead/storage guy and we're still in the migration process from the NetApp to EMC boxes. He used a lot of sayings that started with "EMC says....It should do this... It's supposed to work this way" and I immediately thought back to these posts. We might be in trouble...
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# ? May 11, 2012 19:12 |
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Every time I see these EMC posts I'm so glad they didn't put up too much of an effort in our RFT. E: how hilarious would it be to just turn around, resell the hardware you just got for peanuts and get something else. evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 19:32 on May 11, 2012 |
# ? May 11, 2012 19:27 |
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evil_bunnY posted:Every time I see these EMC posts I'm so glad they didn't put up too much of an effort in our RFT. We actually may, or see if someone is interested in buying it out. Depends on how the support contact works I guess. Either way, we won't be considering EMC in the future. I'm sure the hardware is great if you have a dedicated storage admin or team with a lot of EMC experience, but they are selling the VNX as a small and medium business solution and it's just not. It's a Frankenstein of their Celerra and Clariion lines, and no one seems to know how they work.
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# ? May 11, 2012 19:44 |
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wyoak posted:Is Nimble able to scale out with multiple arrays, or would each array be managed separately? It sounds like they have plans for expansion shelves, have those come out yet? Not today. In the past they have mentioned the possibility: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/22/nimble_scale_out/ I have it from an authoritative source that Nimble is definitively working on scale out arrays. Expect them soon.
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# ? May 11, 2012 20:59 |
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I am sorry this is a tiny bit off subject and probably better suited to the backup thread but I think it will get better eyes here. 99% of my environment is backed up using Veeam, which we arent entirely happy with but thats a different story. What I am asking about is my file server cluster. I have a 2 node windows cluster serving files. The 2 nodes are both VMs and the cluster resource is a lun sitting out on the SAN. Veeam backs up the cluster nodes but of course does not back up the cluster resource lun. I am trying to come up with some ideas for the best way to do backups of the cluster resource. Any suggestions from anyone doing anything similar?
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# ? May 14, 2012 14:25 |
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Syano posted:I am sorry this is a tiny bit off subject and probably better suited to the backup thread but I think it will get better eyes here. 99% of my environment is backed up using Veeam, which we arent entirely happy with but thats a different story. What I am asking about is my file server cluster. I have a 2 node windows cluster serving files. The 2 nodes are both VMs and the cluster resource is a lun sitting out on the SAN. Veeam backs up the cluster nodes but of course does not back up the cluster resource lun. I am trying to come up with some ideas for the best way to do backups of the cluster resource. Any suggestions from anyone doing anything similar?
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# ? May 14, 2012 14:44 |
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Misogynist posted:What are you doing with your Veeam backup repository? The Veeam backup repository is direct attached storage on the backup server proper.
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# ? May 14, 2012 14:46 |
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Just to provide some balance to the thread I want to state that I am a very happy EMC customer. I've been satisfied with their support, you just have to get past the initial over-seas guys - I demand to speak with someone in my time zone and lean on my rep if there is any push-back(god I hate that phrase). I'll take those 5300's off your hands! Currently I'm running a 3 yr old Celerra, 2 DataDomains(one pre-EMC, one post), and of course lots of VMware, again pre- and post- EMC ownership. Internet Explorer posted:We are in this position right now. We went from Equallogic to 2 EMC VNX 5300s and we absolutely hate them. Their products are crap and their support is crap. My boss is the very definition of passive and checked out, and even he is screaming to get them ripped out and returned.
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# ? May 15, 2012 16:09 |
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since everyone's talking emc, anyone have any experience moving from clariion to VNX? Management looks a little better (but not compellent-type nice), reporting still looks really lovely, any stories on better or worse reliability? We've got a CX340 and a CX310 and both have been pretty solid reliability-wise, except a FLARE update that broke powerpath for like 12 hours on a couple servers. Are updates still an all night type ordeal with techs onsite and stuff?
wyoak fucked around with this message at 18:20 on May 15, 2012 |
# ? May 15, 2012 17:53 |
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marketingman posted:So who was complaining about the 255 snapshot limit on DataONTAP That was me, and it's still biting me. We're snapping 12 old filers to 6 new ones, and we have some volumes that are taking forever. Even if you fix it in 8.1 or later it's not going to matter to me, because we won't even upgrade to 8.1 for another year at least. It's best to stick with the proven stable versions on ONTAP.
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# ? May 16, 2012 03:31 |
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I've seen a job advertisement for a NetApp Storage Solutions Architect for a company called "TRACE 3", does anyone here have any experience dealing with them? Are they well known? I'm asking because I'm an Australian and considering what I've been reading in the job threads about the USA effectively having a dire shortage of IT people I was thinking I might give it a go and apply. But being an Aussie I can't really get a feel for this company like people on the ground in the USA can.
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# ? May 16, 2012 03:50 |
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Nomex posted:That was me, and it's still biting me. We're snapping 12 old filers to 6 new ones, and we have some volumes that are taking forever. Even if you fix it in 8.1 or later it's not going to matter to me, because we won't even upgrade to 8.1 for another year at least. It's best to stick with the proven stable versions on ONTAP. The stability differences between major versions of OnTAP aren't, well, major. Because the code base is still fairly similar if a bug pops up and is fixed in the 8.0 code tree then it will also be fixed in the 8.1 code tree. So with 8.1 you're getting the benefit of most of the fixes that were included in 8.0.2. They also cleaned up some code and pared down the code base (no more java, for instance) so 8.1 is actually a more stable baseline than early 8.0 releases are. My recommendation with any new version of DOT, is to wait until it has a few patch releases. By then it's generally pretty stable. That goes for major and minor version. 8.1 should have it's first patch release sometime in early June and likely at least one patch release monthly after that. By August you should have a very stable version with the patched releases. Anecdotally, I've heard pretty good things about 8.1 stability even in the RC code, and the group I'm a part of has something like 300 controllers running 8.1 variants. Marketingman - I don't have any direct experience with Trace3, but they're a NetApp star partner and a couple of their customers are used as references for FlexPod. Sounds like a good company, from what little I know. YOLOsubmarine fucked around with this message at 04:48 on May 16, 2012 |
# ? May 16, 2012 04:13 |
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marketingman posted:I've seen a job advertisement for a NetApp Storage Solutions Architect for a company called "TRACE 3", does anyone here have any experience dealing with them? Are they well known? Not heard of them but then again i'm UK/Aussie based also. Why the US? I know this is a broad statement but I worked there for a year myself and honestly feel Australia is a better place...but I guess it depends on your needs. Vanilla fucked around with this message at 09:32 on May 16, 2012 |
# ? May 16, 2012 09:25 |
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marketingman posted:I've seen a job advertisement for a NetApp Storage Solutions Architect for a company called "TRACE 3", does anyone here have any experience dealing with them? Are they well known? Are you in the San Diego area? I know a few of the sales guys over at Trace-3. Some used to work at EMC or NetApp. They're just an area VAR, like many others. They have some really sharp system architects, too. I bet it would be a fun group to work with. Edit: Duh I thought they were only local to San Diego. I just checked their site and it looks like they have offices in Southern California, the Bay Area, Denver and Phoenix. They're bigger than I thought. Slappy Pappy fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 17, 2012 |
# ? May 17, 2012 04:54 |
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Spamtron, I'm in Australia! Pretty far... Vanilla, sometimes a change is as good as a holiday, and I'm super tired of Australia. I've long wanted to live in NY, and for a long time just the idea of cost stopped me from even looking into it. Now that I see the cost of living for me here, see the lists comparing cost of living around the world... well I'm pretty annoyed: "Perth and Brisbane, which are almost 25 per cent more expensive than New York, are ranked 13th and 14th."
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# ? May 17, 2012 07:24 |
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marketingman posted:Spamtron, I'm in Australia! Pretty far... That's true, exactly the reason why I went from the UK to Australia. I would call working in NY to be 'hardcore' US working if that makes sense. No BS, sell sell sell, 10 days annual leave, etc I have an ex-colleague who is now the a District manager for Netapp in NY. Not spoken to him in many years but happy to put you both in touch on linkedin so you can ask exactly which partners are decent and which to avoid. He may also know who is hiring - let me know if you want me to put you in contact.
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# ? May 17, 2012 16:22 |
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NippleFloss posted:The stability differences between major versions of OnTAP aren't, well, major. Because the code base is still fairly similar if a bug pops up and is fixed in the 8.0 code tree then it will also be fixed in the 8.1 code tree. So with 8.1 you're getting the benefit of most of the fixes that were included in 8.0.2. At this time there's really no benefit to us to upgrade. We have all our filers on stable releases, and there's no new features in 8.1 that we really need aside from the snapshots, and we really only need those now during migrations. Stability is important above all else, so why rock the boat?
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# ? May 18, 2012 04:12 |
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marketingman posted:I've seen a job advertisement for a NetApp Storage Solutions Architect for a company called "TRACE 3", does anyone here have any experience dealing with them? Are they well known? I know a former coworker that currently works for Trace3 and we're currently talking with them about a few solutions. It sounds like they've been pretty aggressive in their hiring the past year or so, and they work with some big clients in the West / Southwest US. I think they also have clients across the world, or at least some of their techs travel to remote client sites. They seem to have a lot of smart people working for them, and they are definitely one of the more fun VARs I've dealt with. If you end up with them I hope you like happy hours
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# ? May 18, 2012 22:04 |
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Nomex posted:At this time there's really no benefit to us to upgrade. We have all our filers on stable releases, and there's no new features in 8.1 that we really need aside from the snapshots, and we really only need those now during migrations. Stability is important above all else, so why rock the boat? 8.1 is more stable than 8.0.1 using the metric of severity 1 and 2 bugs that exist in the release. On the other hand it is less stable than 8.0.2P7.
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# ? May 19, 2012 02:25 |
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http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2012/05/isilon-x400-and-mavericks.html Has anyone seen this Mavericks yet? I don't mean NDA-capped details - though I'd welcome them too - but in general, how is it different?
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# ? May 22, 2012 00:49 |
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We're looking at a new SAN to consolidate some aging infra on VMWare and provide some bulk storage. Right now we're looking at a EMC VNXe 3300 with 15 x 600GB 15K and 6 or 8 x 2TB drives for NFS/CIFS storage. What else should we be looking at in that price range? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the P4000/LeftHand stuff, but I would lose out on the Network Raid crap unless I doubled the price. My HP reseller mentioned a small EVA, but I'm not sure how well that would be received. EMC is the incumbent as the storage guy likes their stuff, so I need something in that price range.
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# ? May 23, 2012 03:10 |
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Alright my current work is using Openfiler virtual nas devices for Shared storage, this is working thus far but I would really rather get a SAN going just need to bump heads with some of you all. I posted in the VMware thread but have gotten some updated numbers and feel this thread a touch more appropriate. Here is the Equipment I want to buy, all are NX3100 Powervaults, OS drive RAID 1 15K SAS 146GB, Dual PSU's, Dual 10G/Ethernet, 2x1GB backend connectors, Write Cache is 512MB on all, Quad cores + 6GB ram on each. NAS A - 10 600Gb 15k drives RAID 5 + 1 HS High end disk I/O intensive storage, SQL, web facing servers, priority VDI, Small NFS share NAS B - 10 1TB 7.2k SAS drives RAID 5 Backend servers, Domain controllers, non priority VDI, other VM's, other NFS servers NAS C - 10 2TB 7.2k SAS drives RAID 5 + HS 1 per array Backup server 10TB will be provisioned for GFS/DRBD on an ACTIVE/ACTIVE with NAS B 10TB deduped and store backups of critical information, after X days file sent to Crash Plan These will run Centos 6.2, primarily iscsi w/ jumbo frames set at 9000. I might however plan to run the data stores over FCoE since it seems the x520-T2 supports it, cutting latency out, and TCP overhead. B and C will do Active/Active storage, then iSCSI to the esxi boxes, A will use C as a backup device All this will hook up to 5 Esxi servers running VDI's and other drives, and 3 Servers running Esxi 4.1, 50+ vm's mostly windows clients and Servers. I know in about 6 months we want to expand our VMware working with clients, hosting solutions, demonstrations for clients, and other things so I find it better to get the ball rolling. I would love to go with EMC or netapp, but I can get this up and running for around 30k. Open for other ways to go about this, I might just do 2 600GB 15K drives ~12TB w/ Active/active, then backup to a NAS C with 20TB, but I like the idea of tiering my storage. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 17:57 on May 23, 2012 |
# ? May 23, 2012 17:54 |
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Corvettefisher posted:I would love to go with EMC or netapp, but I can get this up and running for around 30k. Open for other ways to go about this, I might just do 2 600GB 15K drives ~12TB w/ Active/active, then backup to a NAS C with 20TB, but I like the idea of tiering my storage. I don't have any comments on your design but I'm in a similar position of needing a real SAN. I'm curious what led you to the Powervaults over something like Equallogic. Is it just price?
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# ? May 23, 2012 18:11 |
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Corvettefisher posted:Alright my current work is using Openfiler virtual nas devices for Shared storage, this is working thus far but I would really rather get a SAN going just need to bump heads with some of you all. I posted in the VMware thread but have gotten some updated numbers and feel this thread a touch more appropriate. Why use NAS at all, why not just get some MD3xxxi's and just present iSCSI and use VMFS to your hosts? Or buy some EQL if you get a bigger budget.
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# ? May 23, 2012 18:19 |
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CF, I can't give exact numbers but our pricing on a VNXe box from EMC with close to your data capacity isn't far off that 30K mark. I would also recommend exploring Raid 6 instead of 5. I've heard (probably from this thread) that rebuilding a Raid 5 array with those large disks can take days, and the odds of coming across a bad sector that fucks the rebuild is increased.
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# ? May 23, 2012 18:26 |
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Cpt.Wacky posted:I don't have any comments on your design but I'm in a similar position of needing a real SAN. I'm curious what led you to the Powervaults over something like Equallogic. Is it just price? Worked with them before at other places, they are decent for the price, never had gripes with them compared to HP's solution of NAS devices. The fact I can dig down and customize them via web interface is nice too Nukelear v.2 posted:Why use NAS at all, why not just get some MD3xxxi's and just present iSCSI and use VMFS to your hosts? Or buy some EQL if you get a bigger budget. I could go that way but I have some 10GoE connections and 10g FCoE adapters on the hosts, I would like to put those to use. Seeing how MD's start at 18g for one device, it doesn't look cost effective either. skipdogg posted:CF, I can't give exact numbers but our pricing on a VNXe box from EMC with close to your data capacity isn't far off that 30K mark. Yeah I am going to look about getting a larger write cache though if I go raid 6. If you have any documentation on some SAN setups for around 30k let me know, most places will sell me a single box maxed out for 28 grand or shove 2 mid teir boxes at me with 2-4 gig net interfaces Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 18:35 on May 23, 2012 |
# ? May 23, 2012 18:27 |
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skipdogg posted:We're looking at a new SAN to consolidate some aging infra on VMWare and provide some bulk storage. Right now we're looking at a EMC VNXe 3300 with 15 x 600GB 15K and 6 or 8 x 2TB drives for NFS/CIFS storage. What else should we be looking at in that price range? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the P4000/LeftHand stuff, but I would lose out on the Network Raid crap unless I doubled the price. My HP reseller mentioned a small EVA, but I'm not sure how well that would be received. look at v7000 Unified
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# ? May 23, 2012 18:55 |
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Corvettefisher posted:I could go that way but I have some 10GoE connections and 10g FCoE adapters on the hosts, I would like to put those to use. Seeing how MD's start at 18g for one device, it doesn't look cost effective either. An unpopulated MD3620i with dual controllers is ~9k and is 10GigE, vs 6k for an empty NX. MD also isn't drive locked so feel free to put whatever you want in it. Though again, I'd get enough scratch together to do Equallogic at least. What happens when the raid controller or the motherboard fails in NAS A? Or you need to patch CentOS/WS?
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# ? May 23, 2012 19:09 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 15:40 |
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szlevi posted:http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2012/05/isilon-x400-and-mavericks.html Bit more info here: http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_bl...t=Google+Reader
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# ? May 23, 2012 19:32 |