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Oh god I can tell I'm going to get horrifically abused about this, but I'll ask the question anyway. We are looking to move to 'proper' storage for our VMs and files - from what I've been reading it seems that NFS is the way to go for VMware, and CIFS for your files stuff, combined nicely with things like snapshots so users can use the Previous Versions frontend in Windows to recover recently-deleted stuff. All sounds good. However, our budget is comparatively tiny. I need roughly 6TB for VM, and the same again for files. We've been talking with a vendor who wants us to have an IBM V7000, I had a demo and it looks awesome, but I think it's going to come in close to £20k (UK) which is about double what I've actually got to play with. Dell are keen to sell us a MD3220i, and from doing a bit of research the HP P2000 G3 plays in that sort of space as well. Has anyone used either of these with any success? Am I lining myself up for failure to try and do this for ~£10k and is now the time to start working on getting that budget increased?
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Jul 30, 2012 18:47
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Helpful Posters posted:Useful stuff Thanks, I had a pretty good idea that it wasn't going to happen for that budget but I'm no expert on this stuff. I'll advise that these guys either find more money or change their requirements.
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Jul 30, 2012 22:44
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Is there any reason why someone essentially starting from scratch and purchasing 2-3 new VM hosts and needing storage wouldn't look at something like the new release of vSphere essentials plus and combining it with the internal storage in the new ProLiants? This is for a business at the medium end of SMB (150 users).
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Sep 2, 2012 18:12
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The_Groove posted:Right after that expansion we were down for maybe 2 weeks because it would fail hundreds of drives (even original ones with data), and couldn't see a good portion of the rest. quote:I've been happy with the performance though. Are you loving making GBS threads me? It seems like the people's favourite of 'a bunch of USB disks' would be more reliable at this point.
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Oct 25, 2012 01:58
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I'm sort of in the same position and just picked up an HP P2000 for dick all cash due to the various offers going around. It's not going to set the world on fire but we have people who are comfortable with it so we're sticking with what they know for now.
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Nov 6, 2012 03:13
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Zero VGS posted:I have four SATA 2TB hard drives, and need to make a file server for my hospital. We serve Homefolders with pretty much just Excel and PDF files to 300 (maybe 50 active at a time) users over Gigabit. Either you don't mean hospital or this is some sort of horrible joke
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Apr 24, 2013 00:05
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Honestly I don't want to recommend anything because when it all comes crashing down I'll feel responsible. That's probably not even enough cash for a Synology box and they are in no way suitable for that sort of task.
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Apr 24, 2013 00:20
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I can't believe that your budget for profile storage is under $2 per user. Is someone trying to run their own little splinter cell network without corporate knowing?
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Apr 24, 2013 00:53
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Pretty sure the quotes I had for lower end NetApp were around that figure about 8 months ago, before any haggling on price. Edit: The 15k figure, not the half that option. As mentioned above, there's nothing technically wrong with Synology units, but they don't offer any sort of SLA and I'm not sure I'd want critical data on a box that can also be an iTunes server. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jun 9, 2013 |
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Jun 9, 2013 04:22
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NippleFloss posted:When someone suggests that you buy a 2TB drive at best buy for $150 bucks to store your organizational data you should also suggest that you buy a 400 dollar e-machine desktop to run your critical services too. I mean, why spend $10,000 on a server when it's just a computer and computers are cheap? This is when you get given poo poo for wasting $9600 every time you've ordered a server.
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Jul 19, 2013 00:25
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Holy gently caress, the stickers
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Jul 19, 2013 11:24
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Crazy design, I've heard good things though. What sort of stuff are you storing on it?
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Aug 15, 2013 04:48
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My neighbors son is good with computers and that's what he said to do
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Aug 20, 2013 21:46
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How is the NAS also on USB? That part doesn't make a ton of sense to me. How much data are you looking to backup? How much changes and how often? How long do you need to keep it for? Tandberg Data do some SME backup stuff that's pretty cheap, have a look.
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Aug 27, 2013 19:21
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evil_bunnY posted:You're breaking your head over something that "management" can fix with a $50/mo broadband connection. It's not always that easy - I do some work occasionally for a company of about 12 who are stuck on 1Mb upload unless they pay nearly £700 per month for a leased line.
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Aug 27, 2013 21:22
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How's the MD3200i compare price-wise to the HP P2000? I can't really fault the one we bought.
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Aug 28, 2013 00:34
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I'm assuming that you've gone back to your other vendors now your budget has been upped? I think pretty much everyone is capable of offering lots of awesome features when you have the budget for it.
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Aug 29, 2013 22:18
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I was going to ask this in the virtualisation thread but I have 200 posts to catch up on in there and it's on-topic now. What's the best way to connect to iSCSI storage from within a guest OS? When I've set up VMware and iSSCI the storage has always been on its own network on NICs dedicated to that task. Do I need to link the storage network physically to the same network that the VMs use or what?
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Oct 8, 2013 23:22
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It was purely hypothetical. Everything I've experienced personally or read about has iSCSI storage down as being on its own network with dual paths etc, I was just wondering what the 'cleanest' way of connecting iSCSI targets to guests was without loving up the whole point of having a separate storage network.
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Oct 8, 2013 23:55
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KS posted:With software iscsi, it usually looks a little something like this: Cheers for that - it's how I had an idea it might be done but I wasn't sure if VMkernel NICs should only carry that type of traffic.
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Oct 9, 2013 00:02
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It's worse when the web UI doesn't specifically state what you are about to delete (instead just popping up a generic "are you sure you want to delete") and the action of clicking the delete button jumps the highlighted option up or down the list due to a UI bug. You have to click cancel and then do it really slowly.
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Oct 15, 2013 19:49
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I've had experience with an MSA P2000 iSCSI unit with a couple of expansion bays. It's easy enough to set up, the hardware design is nothing special but it's not terrible. Honestly I only ended up using it due to budget constraints, but the thing worked fine and the performance was as expected. If I was doing it again I'd probably pick one of the lower end Dell MD arrays, especially as they can do SSD caching, which wasn't a feature when I was looking at them. I think you could also level the complaint about acquiring vendors and not doing much with them at Dell as well with Compellent / EqualLogic, although the latest round of products seems to be addressing this. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Oct 22, 2013 |
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Oct 22, 2013 22:53
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No it didn't , the UI was still terrible 3 months ago. It had the undocumented admin account which we managed to dodge by pure coincidence because that was the account details I found when I was Googling for the default credentials and changed it because HPs documentation is pure poo poo and it's impossible to find relevant information on their website. Edit: That's a response to Docjowles's post
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Oct 22, 2013 23:00
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"Well if you don't have to enter the CALs anywhere then I don't see how they can tell how many users we have" I dealt with a small business once where one of the co-owners decided randomly overnight to change the 'server' and one of the desktops to Ubuntu overnight so they were effectively down a PC the next day and nobody could get to any file shares. This was the same guy who thought that spending time trying to trick Samba into being an AD domain controller rather than just buying a Windows Server license was a good use of time and money. I'm glad I gave up trying to help them. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Oct 23, 2013 |
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Oct 23, 2013 23:08
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One thing I will say in defence of smaller businesses is that Microsoft software is priced really loving ridiculously high, as well as being the most confusing thing you'll ever read. If you've got a small number of PCs the initial spend needed to go with some sort of volume license agreement is insane since you pretty much have to buy all your current licenses again just to be able to buy SA. There's no way to migrate your retail boxed server licenses across and just buy SA on them, or add SA to the Windows licenses included with the PCs you've just bought. This initial hit only gets bigger as the company grows until you're at the point where it's a gently caress ton of money to spend just to stay where you currently are but with SA. Either that or the rep I spoke to was utter poo poo. Thanks Ants fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Oct 23, 2013 |
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Oct 23, 2013 23:26
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Nobody wants to support old stuff. Have you asked NetApp if you can trade it in?
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Oct 30, 2013 19:41
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It's a 2007 model and adding 12 months warranty on after the original (3 years?) warranty is up is always quite pricey. I wouldn't consider those costs ridiculous but I'd seriously consider replacing it versus paying out in maintenance for another few years.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:57
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Is there such a thing as a NAS aimed at the SMB market that isn't utter poo poo? It seems that vendors are more concerned with putting crap like iTunes servers on them and building in photo gallery applications than making sure that they aren't full of show-stopping bugs.
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Oct 31, 2013 01:37
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Yeah it's Synology box that's giving me issues. Put it under load and it restarts a load of services and drops all connections momentarily. Not really getting anywhere with their support people. Edit: Performance counters all look good - not maxing out RAM, CPU, NICs etc. Really annoying me now.
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Oct 31, 2013 02:04
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Was just poking around on the box via SSH to see if the logs had anything meaningful in (they don't) and got the following:code:
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Oct 31, 2013 02:39
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Yeah I'll take note of the serials before it goes away. Thanks for the help, I thought it was a different issue but nope, same network problems.
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Oct 31, 2013 02:52
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RAID5 shouldn't be used with modern data sizes because your array is at risk while a very lengthy rebuild takes place. RAID6 is great if you need something fairly resilient and don't have tons of cash to throw at it. It's not a setup that results in anything particularly quick.
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Nov 5, 2013 16:25
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Because somewhere there's a person who genuinely believes that they are getting huge discounts.
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Nov 27, 2013 20:59
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It depends if you go by what Microsoft thinks a small business is, or whether you're using the real world definition. If it's the real world then you probably won't see a SAN in a small business, just a NAS backing up to another NAS in a different location / different room. Or no backups. Going up the scale you get the dedicated backup appliances, I think someone here bought a Unitrends appliance they were quite happy with. Then in the Microsoft definition of SMB stuff like DataDomain.
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Jan 13, 2014 15:02
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Other than the cost of the drives being cheaper than tape, isn't Blu-ray more expensive in every way?
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Jan 31, 2014 19:51
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Docjowles posted:The guy from Facebook addresses that in the article. He feels that if a bunch of large enterprises start ordering hundreds of thousands of Blu-Rays, the economies of scale would reduce the per-disc cost to basically nothing. That's a hell of a gamble to take though.
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Jan 31, 2014 20:20
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I've been reading a bit into Scale-Out File Servers and it's almost impossible to read anything about Hyper-V that Microsoft have produced without also coming across it. What I'm really struggling to work out is what the point of it is? It seems to be pitched at the lower end of the market as a less expensive SAN alternative, but needs two servers to act as the redundant hosts, a dual-ported JBOD shelf, RAID controllers that can understand what's going on etc. I'm really failing to see how it's a better proposition than just buying a low-end SAN seeing as the people making hardware for it aren't particularly big and there's still an element of 'building it yourself' and all the support issues that go along with that. Is anyone using them / used them in the past and can explain why it exists?
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Feb 12, 2014 12:54
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Microsoft and picking product names that other people haven't already used don't really go hand in hand.
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Feb 12, 2014 16:32
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What's the current limitation on rebuild times? Is it something that could be solved by better silicon?
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Feb 17, 2014 23:22
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I think you might be the target market for the Windows SoFS thing that was talked about a few posts back, especially if you want to be able to grow the system without being tied to a particular vendor. I'm not qualified enough to say for certain that it will do what you need, there are people in the thread that are though. The Oracle storage appliances are quite popular as well.
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Feb 18, 2014 19:01
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