ISCSI SAN

[nitrobass24]

I'm thinking about building or buying myself a storage system that can hold at least 8 drives and all I really want it to do is be an Iscsi box.

Do any [H] users know of a place that sells Iscsi boxes on the cheap?

[TeedOff]

Check out openfiler.

[nitrobass24]

Yea ive used openfiler but then im still stuck with buying a case, mobo, controller, cables, hotswapcages PSU, NICs etc. All that added up it going to be close to $1200, and i feel that i could prob find something premade for that much

[nitrobass24]

bump

[unhappy_mage]

Unless you get a discount somewhere, a prebuilt box for 8 drives (or, more likely, 12 in 2u) will be at least $3k. If you can just buy the case for $1200 you're lucky, or picking out cheap parts. Adding an iscsi controller is not cheap.

What about something like a box with a SAS expander and hotplug disks? It's not iscsi, but if you connect it directly you can get significantly more performance than gigE affords.

[nitrobass24]

What about something like a box with a SAS expander and hotplug disks? It's not iscsi, but if you connect it directly you can get significantly more performance than gigE affords.

What would you recommend for a sas/sata expander( I will be using 1tb sata drives) I guess i would also need to get a rackmount case for hotswap.

[sabregen]

not necessarily a rackmount. Supermicro (and I'm sure others) make 4U or tower (you can convert) chassis that have a built in 8 drive backplane. You just go from SAS PCI-E controller installed in your motherboard to the fanout connector on the back of the SAS controller card, to the backplane. The backplane handles power and data port distribution. It's a cheap (relatively) way of solving your issue. Now, SAS drives on the other hand, are not cheap. You could also look into a SATA raid controller, and a chassis with a SATA backplane, and go large SATA drives, which would be a lot more budget friendly.

[unhappy_mage]

What would you recommend for a sas/sata expander( I will be using 1tb sata drives) I guess i would also need to get a rackmount case for hotswap.

The SC933E1 (http://www.wiredzone.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=10017422) (chassis manual (http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/chassis/3U/SC933.pdf)) has a case, a power supply, and an expander for 15 drives for $950. More drives than you asked for, but about the cheapest option I've seen for that many drives. You can mount the host system in it, or with another hundred bucks of cable make it external.

Two things about it: it won't be quiet, and it won't be as nice as it could be unless you have a rack. These are really made to be in another room, and it shows. The "quiet" models still have 5k 80mm fans in them, which generate a fairly loud woosh. And if you don't have a rack you're stuck with a non-floor-friendly box. But if you've got the infrastructure to use this, it's a great, cheap way to go.

[AreEss]

Go buy some used IBM DS300's. Everyone's dumping them. Trade on the chassis is worth less than a single disk - got $50 for my dual controllers and $320 a disk.

Then you can enjoy all the suffering and suck of iSCSI for a couple hundred bucks, and learn for yourself why anybody putting serious load on disk, doesn't go within a thousand miles of iSCSI.

[nitrobass24]

Go buy some used IBM DS300's. Everyone's dumping them. Trade on the chassis is worth less than a single disk - got $50 for my dual controllers and $320 a disk.

Then you can enjoy all the suffering and suck of iSCSI for a couple hundred bucks, and learn for yourself why anybody putting serious load on disk, doesn't go within a thousand miles of iSCSI.

Well then tell me this. Lets assume for a second that people dont use iSCSI. Why do you say this and what else do you reccomend instead of iscsi?

[m1abram]

Well then tell me this. Lets assume for a second that people dont use iSCSI. Why do you say this and what else do you reccomend instead of iscsi?

iscsi is an inexpensive way to have shared storage to use in clusters. Course you need more than just iscsi for shared storage (clustering filesystem). You can not do shared storage with SAS or SATA. The other option is to use fibre channel or infiniband but that is much more expensive. Note to those not familiar with shared storage I am NOT talking about things like NFS and Windows file sharing.

iSCSI is not that bad to deal with, however it does take some understanding. Do not just create an NTFS partition and have 5 machine read/write to it via iSCSI that will not end well.

Another purpose for iSCSI is distance, you can access the storage from much further away, however this application seems to have very niche markets.

[unhappy_mage]

You can not do shared storage with SAS or SATA.

Sas does shared storage just fine. See for example LSI's SAS switch (http://www.lsi.com/news/product_news/2006_03_30.html) or read about multipath I/O.

[BartY]

What are you doing that would necessitate block level storage??

If you're just storing music, movies and photos, you want a NAS, not a SAN.