20tb Usable Synchronous Storage Cluster?

H

hutchingsp

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 24, 2006
Messages
150
I'm planning our imminent storage/server refresh.

Right now we have P4000 split across 2 sites with 10GbE and a third witness site on 1GbE.

Our IOPS is very low (< 2000 @ 95th percentile).

My current plan is to spec up a pair of ML350's each with 16x3tb nearline SAS drives in RAID10 and a couple of SSDs.

I then plan on using HP SmartCache on the SmartArray to make the SSDs available as disk cache.

I then plan on running 2x VSA on each box (I need 2 to get the 20tb of capacity that I require).

The Storage Network would be 10GbE with 1GbE as standby adaptor.

Thoughts?
 
SME with around 12tb of data, fully virtualised (VMware), AD, Exchange, File Servers etc.

We have a large physical campus with our own fiber everywhere which means we can do things like stretch clusters very easily.

I have a bit of an issue with paying huge premiums for proprietary vendor storage hardware (Netapp/EMC etc.) so have been looking at what we could do with storage as software but with tier one hardware and software.
 
What's wrong with more/newer P4000? It seems like the feature set of these units is very robust and rich. I've got some myself and they seems to work pretty well. I've read VSA is a bit slow and been told to stay away from it. The renewed lefthand units can be had at much cheaper prices than most places. I got mine for about 8k per.
 
That's a very likely option - the lack of viable alternatives is surprising though.

For example I'd love to use NFS for the VMs but other than Netapp or true roll-your-own I can't find anything that does unified with failover/HA.
 
With the newer firmwares, Equallogic will do synchronous writes and failover as well. Might look at the 4110E and 6110E series. They can be had with 3TB NLSAS drives and 10GbE
 
If you need NFS with syncronous writes, you may also check Solarish ZFS
(With support and stable from Nexenta, OmniOS or Oracle) on standard server hardware.
(OmniOS is free software with support optional)

For fast sync-writes and NFS, ZFS supports dedicated ZIL drives like a Dram based ZeusRam.
If you need HA, see high-availability.com otherwise you can use async replication via zfs send for free.
 
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