A few SAN questions?

I know this is "technically" storage talk, but, well, networking subforum is far more active.

I've got a Bladecenter chassis with 2 Brocade 4Gps 20-port FC switches. Attached to it are 2 SANs, a NetApp2020 and 2050. I've also got a pair of McData Sphereon 4500 (2Gbps FC switches) and an IBM DS4700 SAN that make up another fabric. The hosts attached to the DS4700 are bieng deprecated, but I'd like to keep the storage around.

what (if any?) considerations need to be made when considering moving the DS4700 over to the brocade switches?

my zoning is all single intiator (ESXi running on bladecenter blades, and a few SQL2k8R2 servers) to multiple targets (the 2020 and 2050), do I jsut need to make an alias for the DS4700, and add itt o my existing zones?

Why not just attach the storage to your FAS2050? Can't you hook it up and use with the vFiler thingy. Forget what it's called exactly but you can provision and use other vendors storage with your NetApps.

I thought a person needed a vSeries filer for that? even then, i'm maxed out on the number of spindles for my 2050.

If for some reason I can't put my DS4700 on the brocade fabric, I'll probabaly jsut end up using it for some backup storage space as a DAS on the backup server, and do LAN free VCB from the NetApp storage to te DS4700

vFiler is a separate device..can't just stick other storage behind a FAS.

You basically have it. Just connect it in to the fabric and either add it to your existing zones or create new ones.

Boo. Oh, well, it was a thought. I'm not very knowing in the FC department, no more help from me. I usually just do 10Gbps NFS everywhere now.

NetJunkie said:

vFiler is a separate device..can't just stick other storage behind a FAS.

You basically have it. Just connect it in to the fabric and either add it to your existing zones or create new ones.

Click to expand...

cool, glad I'm on the right track. Any advantage to creating a new zone, as opposed ot adding a third target to each existing zone? I know it's best practice to have one zone per initiator (ie, don't create a zone with multiple intiators) but i've never really looked into having multiple zones per initiator.

Captain Colonoscopy said:

Boo. Oh, well, it was a thought. I'm not very knowing in the FC department, no more help from me. I usually just do 10Gbps NFS everywhere now.

Click to expand...

I'd totally do 10GBps NFS, NFS is great for datastores, but i've already got too much money tied up in al these 4Gbps HBAs in all the blades and the Brocade switches (which I just droped another $7k into for more port licenses)

when it comes time to buy a new SAN, and we retire the 2000 series FAS stuff, I'm pretty sure I'll go all 10Gb, already looking at FAS3210's for maybe next (fiscal) year

How you zone is up to you. "Best practice" usually says single initiator zoning but that's really to protect yourself. Often I cheat...just depends what and where.

FAS3210 is the shit. I'm getting to put one, maybe two, of those this summer. FAS3210 with dual PAMII cards and 24x 600GB SAS Shelf. WUT?

Captain Colonoscopy said:

FAS3210 is the shit. I'm getting to put one, maybe two, of those this summer. FAS3210 with dual PAMII cards and 24x 600GB SAS Shelf. WUT?

Click to expand...

I was tlkaing to a netapp engineer at a Vmware users group the other week, excited about 3210
I'm kinda pumped about maybe getting some flash cache, DBA is drooling over it methinks, haha. Although fusion IO has been tlaking to some people in my organization, anyone looked into both fusion IO and NetApp PAM/flash cache?

EDIT; also, thanks for the answers guys, this subforum is great, I can actually ask questions about work stuff, and it's not completely filled with garbage about sub $100 home networking products!

Yeah, PAMII is the shit. Why would you want to auto-tier your stuff anyway? Haven't really looked at Fusion I/O yet. Might have to take a peek and see what the fuss is about. Most of the time I only work with FAS2020/2040s as I serve the SMB/SME mostly. We have a few big projects in the works where I'll get to work on 3200 series, though, and I'm excited.

And, in response to your edit. Why not just build dual OpenFiler boxes and RSYNC them for redundancy??!!

Why wouldn't you want to auto tier?

Why move your data from SATA to SAS and back with the associated performance hits incurred during the copy process when you can simply auto-cache your most frequently used data into a mass of SSD on the fly? I guess it depends on your defnition of auto-tiering.

Because you don't take a hit on the copy. Data is moved in the background between tiers. I'm not a NetApp guy, I'm an EMC guy and we're doing a lot of autotiering arrays. You get better performance at a lower cost than traditional tiering, plus I can do FASTCache (both read AND write) using SSDs for applications that benefit there too.

Different tools for different purposes.

Different strokes for different folks. There is plenty of FUD from both vendors on that....

So storage tiering and PAM/FAST Cache are two similar principles but ultimately different things.

Firstly PAM cards and EMC Fast Cache are all about one thing - increasing the array cache. Data that is most frequently accessed is brought up to the PAM / Fast Cache tier so I/O is serviced faster. Think of it as just extending array cache.

Fusion I/O cards are the same thing but they are on the server bus directly. Fusion I/O are great but have some stiff competition coming from Violin and EMC.

Automatic Storage Tiering is to boost performance and lower cost. If you take a 100GB LUN it may be the case that only 10GB of that LUN actually needs performance. The array will automatically analyse the LUN on a sub-LUN basis and move stale data down to slower SATA tiers and promote active data to SSD tiers. Typical affect is a huge portion of data goes down to SATA. It's a disk level activity.

This can be used in conjunction with technologies such as PAM and FAST Cache. However it's a feature of a handful of vendors including EMC, HDS, HP and Compllent (Dell), offer. Netapp does not offer such functionality.

Side note: In a slightly different SAN playing field, the Equallogic stuff support automatic tiering as well.

haven't done much with auto-tiering storae, don't have any ATA disk, all my shelves are 300GB FC drives, only SAS I have is in the filer heads.