Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Wicaeed posted:

Any storage guru's recommend any books/guides/technical manuals for learning SAN's? I recently started a job at a Data Center, and am looking to make myself more attractive for promotion. Cisco Cert + SAN experience should fit that bill nicely imo.

pet peeve/grammar nazi. Use an apostrophe to denote possession (The guru's ball is green), add an s or es to make a noun plural (gurus are great, SANs are special).

I doubt you're going to find a lot of books for learning SANs (although I could be wrong). A lot of them are proprietary and there aren't standard interfaces. Some of the terminology/storage/FC/iSCSI basics might be found in a book, but experience is king.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2008 21:52

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 08:50

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

gallop w/a boner posted:

Is it possible to measure IOPS using Windows System Monitor?

IO requests/sec is a ~equivalent metric in perfmon.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2009 15:33

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Syano posted:

Ok I need some help from some iscsi gurus and I figured this was the place to ask. I have an EMC CX3-10 array and a file server running win2k3 attached to it running powerpath 5.2 and iscsi initiator. This server is losing its shares every time it gets rebooted. No problem right? The lanman service is coming up before the iScsi targets are reconnected. Well, that is the problem. I have gone through the process of making the lanman service dependent upon the iscsi and powerpath services but I am still having the problem of the shares being down upon reboot and having to reshare the folders.

I have gone through Dell support and still have an active ticket with those guys but I thought maybe there was something I was missing that one of you guys could throw my way.

Try to have the lanman service dependent on the spooler service. IIRC, it's one of the last services to come up.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2009 21:38

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

If you have a windows server, you might be able to use DFS to do what you want.

Edit: reread what you want, don't know that DFS would apply.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2009 18:43

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Weird Uncle Dave posted:

That sounds like way more than what I'd need. Right now, the mail server is an eight-year-old Dell PowerEdge, and all the email is on three 15krpm SCSI drives, RAID-5'd, and everything works perfectly well.

Left perfmon running over lunch, and the drive with all the mailboxes peaked at about 100 IOPS. Granted, that was lunch, and I'll leave things running for a couple days and peek in on them occasionally.

Most of the other servers are very light on disk use (static Web pages, DNS, very small databases, things that are more memory-bound than anything, fortunately RAM is cheap). So I should be okay in terms of disk speed; looks like even the cheapest EqualLogic iSCSI SAN will probably have plenty of that, both for now and for later. (I'm not wedded to EqualLogic by any means, just that they're Dell, and we've generally had good luck with Dell in the past.)

Assuming we go iSCSI (FC is probably way out of my budget), do I need any special magic gigabit Ethernet switch, or will any decent one do?

A decent one will do. I'm partial to the HP Procurve line, although if you want jumbo frames + flow control you need a higher end switch. The 2824 would probably suit you fine (I have 2848s and they work flawlessly). It might be possible to go with a lower cost, unmanaged Procuve, but I don't know what would be capable off the top of my head.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2009 21:22

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Has anyone heard of backblaze? Seems like a personal backup service, but their blog post on their infrastructure is pretty cool - http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

# ¿ Sep 2, 2009 18:49

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

optikalus posted:

Edit: also, anyone remember that whitepaper about SATA drives reaching 2TB in a RAID setting will almost always be guaranteed to fail upon rebuild due to the size of the drive exceeding the drive's own bit error MTBF?

Yep. I remember it on a different site, but here's the link I found - http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

Also, remember that google paper a while back, showing little correlation between hdd temperature and failure rate - http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.html.

da sponge fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 2, 2009

# ¿ Sep 2, 2009 19:30

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Cyberdud posted:

let's say the less expensive the better, i don't think we could go above 15-20k. Also skill set with SAN/NAS is nonexistant, so i'm willing to learn as much as possible.

EDIT: also would be looking for a Gigabit switch supporting jumbo frames.

Jumbo frames AND flow control is what you want, although many entry level / mid level switches don't support both (like the procurve 2800 series, much to my disappointment). That said, I'm running 4 ESX hosts with ~30 VMs off round robined iSCSI with the default 1500 byte MTU without issue.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2010 16:54

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

egoslicer posted:

Does anyone have any experience with NexSan? We are looking at their SATABoy product for our hosting our initial round of VDIs. Our users only really use Word, Excel, and a couple of web apps and nearly bottom out when it comes to perfmon across the board. We wanted something inexpensive, but decent. It is looking to go between NexSan or a MDI3200.

I'm using 2 of their SASBoys w/dual controllers over FC (they are pretty much the same as the SATABoy). The SASBoys are the core of our ESX cluster and are rock solid. I think I had to use support once and they were very responsive.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2010 19:04

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

idolmind86 posted:

I agree 100% but we work with some pretty large customers who just don't seem to get it. For instance the latest headache has been by a very large customer who claims they have no physical storage in house and that all storage is done on a central veritas cluster and that there is absolutely no way to install on a physical disk.

..and they can only present that storage to the app server over NFS and not iSCSI or FC?

# ¿ Nov 29, 2010 23:08

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

Vanilla posted:

servers NICs but you need an iSCSI TOE card if you want to boot from iSCSI SAN?
-- All you need with iSCSI is the MS Initiator, which is free.
-- Generic IP switches are fine - or do they need certain 'things?

It's a good idea to make sure your switch can support jumbo frames AND flow control simultaneously.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2011 15:20

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 08:50

da sponge: May 24, 2004; ..and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.

EnergizerFellow posted:

Jumbo frames are a complete waste of time on modern NICs and switches, in addition to causing latency issues.

I could see it being useless on vm network side of things, but does that hold true for the usage patterns on storage network as well?

This shows a sizable jump in throughput (although it doesn't compare it to latency)
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi3_performance_enhancements_wp.pdf

# ¿ Jun 2, 2011 16:16

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Storage Megathread: Why is my NAS a SAN?