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Ask me enterprise storage questions!

E

electric!sheep

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 1, 2001
Messages
7,544
I'll try to respond at least every Friday, when I flush my brain from a week of work in the data storage industry. RAID/NAS/SAN/DAS/iSCSI, you name it. I might not know everything, but I can at least guide you in the right direction. :)
 
LOL your on

under what circumstance do you see an advantage to "plaiding"
(software RAID on Hardware RAID)
historically and currently (if any)
 
Ice Czar said:
LOL your on

under what circumstance do you see an advantage to "plaiding"
(software RAID on Hardware RAID)
historically and currently (if any)
Click to expand...

For starters, it's a way to do more advanced RAID if your controller sucks; e.g., you could imitate RAID 50 by doing a software stripe across some RAID 5 arrays. I've seen a number of modern RAID subsystems that do 0+#, but not the more robust #0 raid levels. Also, you won't see a hardware RAID array larger than 2TB due to a SCSI protocol limitation, so OS-level software RAID can be used to merge multiple arrays into a single volume.

Another quirky application along these lines is doing a RAID1 mirror across a local disk and an iSCSI volume (typically partitioned off a hardware RAID array) for remote backup purposes.
 
I bet I can keep this on the front page for a month :p

Describe some typical nearline backup schemes employed using SAN nodes
 
Ice Czar said:
I bet I can keep this on the front page for a month :p

Describe some typical nearline backup schemes employed using SAN nodes
Click to expand...

Bah, you're just quizzing me, but I might learn something along the way. :p It's pretty vague--SAN is just storage connected to fibre. It could just as well be direct-attached SCSI. The main thing that makes SAN/DAS suck for near-line is that you can't really access volumes from multiple machines without getting raped on special software licensing costs, so you need to first back your clients up to a NAS share or iSCSI volume. In any case, slow, cheap ATA disks are what make near-line storage what it is. Pack a bunch of 250GB 5400rpm Maxtors into a SATA->FC RAID box, create a volume, mount it on the relevant system, and there you go.
 
well they made me the mod in here so I started reading up on enterprise storage
(couple of subscriptions and newsletters)
but its all theoretical, and alot of the time Im only catching a reference to something that is assumed knowledge, so....

those are actually honest questions :D
I think this thread has the potential to be quite educational for both myself and the membership

this is one Id likely be able to answer at least theoretically

describe some typical backup schemes from a small single site company
throught a mid range example
to a heavily accessed always online database and or mutiple node / location SAN
where the backup windows are very very small

( I realize this bears a striking similarity to the previous question, but was hoping for an answer more members might be able to follow ;) )
 
This probably isn't the kind of question your looking for, but I need to know anyways. I just ordered a 80 gb hard drive to replace my 40 gb drive, but I don't want to have to go through all the trouble of reinstalling everything and putting all my updates back on (they are both Western Digital Special Edition drives), so I want to use the drive-drive copy feature from a program called Data Lifegaurd, from Western digital. It apparently is supposed to work. I asked my brother about doing it like that (I consider him to be very knowledgable compared to myself) and he told me that I should just slave the second drive for now, and when I want to do the clone, use norton ghost, he mentioned that it might not work properly, not make it a boot drive, and make the 80 gb drive into 2 partitions. But I wanted to do the clone as soon as possible, so would this Lifegaurd work? or will I need to get ghost just to be sure?
 
Ok, I got one. What was the main use of WORM jukeboxes? Tell us about them! I have a HP optical jukebox sitting in my garage collecting dust. :)
 
first post ever, take it easy on the n00b.
I'm looking to make a system with about 1 or 1.5 TB of space in it, with write speeds of about 50-70m/s (minimum) and read speeds as high as possible. I realize I'll prolly get better than this. Is it worth looking at hardware RAID5, or just get a bunch of pci ide controllers and use linux software raid? I'm thinking about 8 200GB seagates (hitachis are better bang/buck but louder) since noise is a concern. How about FC or SCSI raid? for this size and performance, how 'enterprise' should I look?
 
since Im online I'll answer a few of those
first Fibre Channel RAID cards are horribly expensive, and you likely dont need that
2nd most ATA HDDs can only manage 50 to 30 MB/s sustained Transfer Rate
(from the outer edge of the platter to the inner) for a single HDD

next a RAID 5 array requires that parity calculations are made and that impacts write quite a bit

now there are RAID cards that would easily enable you to hit the 70>50MB/s target
and with redundancy too in RAID 0+1 which is the best for performance and possibly with other RAID Levels (which would be kinder on capacity effciency) depending on the number of drives , the controller and the type of application (file size) you need to write, SATA or SCSI might be applicable

so a little more information would help
what would the "typical" write be? video? database?

Ohmsford said:
This probably isn't the kind of question your looking for, but I need to know anyways. I just ordered a 80 gb hard drive to replace my 40 gb drive, but I don't want to have to go through all the trouble of reinstalling everything and putting all my updates back on (they are both Western Digital Special Edition drives), so I want to use the drive-drive copy feature from a program called Data Lifegaurd, from Western digital. It apparently is supposed to work. I asked my brother about doing it like that (I consider him to be very knowledgable compared to myself) and he told me that I should just slave the second drive for now, and when I want to do the clone, use norton ghost, he mentioned that it might not work properly, not make it a boot drive, and make the 80 gb drive into 2 partitions. But I wanted to do the clone as soon as possible, so would this Lifegaurd work? or will I need to get ghost just to be sure?
Click to expand...

LifeGuard will work just fine for a simple clone of a smaller drive onto a larger one, and its actually simpler to use than Ghost, its alot less flexible but this senerio was exactly what it was built for, I think it might expand your one patition to fill the drive, but if it doesnt, start a thread and PM me the link, we can use diskpart.exe to enlarge it in Windows
or I might convince you there are advantages to having more than one partition :p
and that any cosmetic things that bug you about that (navigation) can also be addressed ;)

for a physical configuration attach the new drive on the channel opposite the current HDD (it will clone much faster that way)
and either boot to the floppy or you can do it from inside windows as well, if for any reason you cant boot once you attach the new HDD access the BIOS and change the boot order from HDD 0 to HDD 1 (thats generally under the Advanced BIOS Features submenu)

so Good Luck ;)
 
Ice Czar said:
so a little more information would help
what would the "typical" write be? video? database?
Click to expand...

it's going to be audio. multi-channel, high quality, uncompressed audio for a recording studio. (i'm unhappy_mage's brother btw) the high speed reads/writes are necessary because he doesn't want it to take forever to edit the songs and save them.
 
that is basically like a video file access Id imagine, large files with mostly sequential reads and writes, lots of virtual memory for "history" like in photoshop but only in the editor this time?

Ideally Id recommend a redundant storage array like a RAID 5 to store the data, youd then transfer it on and off a fast performance array that is smaller
this array could also be redundant as a RAID 0+1 or possibly NetCells SynchRAID which is an specialized optimized RAID3, or even Linux software RAID, in SATA 10k or SCSI

here are some benchmarks of various SATA RAID Cards\
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/400
and SCSI
http://www.tweakers.net/plan/233

sorry they are in Dutch, but the Benchmark that Femme Taken uses is made with the same suite as StorageReiews Benchmark, IPEAK SPT

now the big question.....budget
there is a number of solutions that will address your needs,
the question is do you have to make it an all in one solution with all the above
(performance, capacity and redundancy) or can it be broken into
(performance redundancy) & (capacity redundancy)
or even (performance) & (capacity redundancy)

I have to go to sleep but will check back AM :)
 
for the audio i definately recommend a nice 10k/15k scsi RAID0 and just dump your projects to a giant RAID5 IDE array every night or something...

trust me i do a lot of audio work and 8x 10K SCSI drives in a RAID0 is a beautiful thing :D

and i usually do 8 tracks of 20bit 96khz stuff at a time and have never maxed out UW SCSI (40mb/s)... but aim at U160, its dirt cheap now
 
saturnine2 said:
Ok, I got one. What was the main use of WORM jukeboxes? Tell us about them! I have a HP optical jukebox sitting in my garage collecting dust. :)
Click to expand...


We use a WORM Jukebox here for archiving all of our member's statements. We scan them in and than write them to the WORM drive. We use a AppXtender program that runs over the Citrix Farm to allow the member service reps at our branches to view member's statements from years back if they ask for it.
 
Ok, that's about what I was thinking. I was also going for two seperate machines, one a server and the other the recording machine. So the studio machine will have a scsi raid array, raid0, and then a gigE link over to the linux box via samba, and a raid5 with 8 200GB ide's. Some sort of rsync cron job to grab everything overnight. We have a max of 10 input tracks (for now), so scsi raid with just two disks should be enough, right? please? I want a sff system for the recording machine so it's portable. (rogue_jedi thinks that it's a bad idea to go sff because of lack of 64bit pci. I think 32bit should handle it. However, is the new dual opteron from iwill going to have 64bit pci?)

Oh, and is gigE fast enough? please say no...
biggrin.gif


would sata raid0 be fast enough for the studio machine? scsi is nice and all, but sata is like 4039 times cheaper. two raptors?

that's all for now. thanks.
 
unhappy_mage said:
However, is the new dual opteron from iwill going to have 64bit pci?
Click to expand...

its extremely likely
the current dual Iwills have the same AMD series 8000 chipset my Tyan Does
and that has a dual PCI-X bus (8131)

and they are the basis of most (all?) of the Boxx Technology Opteron lineup
 
Well, you could go Tyan Opteron with a ZCR card. That'll give you 2 channel (I believe) Adaptec (!) U160 RAID onboard, 64bit PCI and 2xOpterons. You can slap in some 15K.3 drives for swapping, (and small OS partition) and 2 huge ATA drives for archives. RAID1. Or you can pick from a good selection of SATA RAID cards for RAID5 mass storage.

Or for a cheaper route, you could pick up the MSI K8T Master2-FAR board with dual Opterons, onboard SATA RAID with preferably 2xRaptors and 2x large IDE drives. I think there's 350GB drives now, 5400RPM, but for storage and occasional sequential reads that's still OK.

For portability, that should be fine. It'll be heavy in a full tower. No big deal. One person can lift it. I went to a LAN once with 4x SCSI and 1X IDE drive in a Chieftec tower. It was heavy, but manageable.

My $.02
 
Just about to the implementation stage of a fairly large (for our organization) upgrade, consisting of replacement of our two very much aging NT 4.0 servers (running on p3 450's!). Here's what i've got spec'd out so far:

5 each of:
dual opteron 246 (for the 400mhz fsb)
Tyan k8sr
I-Star d-400L case (400w redundant p/s)
2GB ECC DDR400
Adaptec TOE iSCSI HBA

All booting off of a 16 drive iSCSI SAN/NAS device (depending on which way you're accessing it i guess...). 12 of the drives are 74gb raptors, and 4 are 250gb western digitals. The 12 speedier drives are for most of the database work, booting, exchange, whatever, and the 250's are for video recording for our digital surveillance system. All this is going through a netgear 24port non-blocking gigabit managed (layer 2) switch. All servers will run server 2003 (san/nas device will be running server 2003 storage edition).

So... Any thoughts/comments/recommendations? I'll definitely post pics everywhere when i'm done, as this is only about half of what will soon be a full 44u rack, which i am not going to be able to resist modding the hell out of... ;)
 
Please help me convince my Boss to move from Disk->Tape backups to Disk-> Disk backups. I'm the admin here and I currently have 2 instances of Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 kicking (one for the DMZ, one for Internal). The DMZ is fine (only 6 servers), but the internal is really starting to get hammeres. We have an HP Surestor 24x6 Ultrium-1 Drive that used to be able to get the backups done between 11pm and 8am, but for the last 2 months it has been struggling to finish before 1pm. The reason is simple: we've added more servers. I'm trying to backup 22 servers in a 9 hour window. The tape drive just can't hack it.

Part of our backup implementation is a Parent--> Child --> Grandchild off-site tape rotation. We're a fairly large Credit Union and we have a ton of member info that just cannot be lost for ANY reason. The hard thing to sway my boss away from is the off-site side of things. If I could somehow convince him of a system using removable Hard drives or the likes, I know I could get this put in the budget and make my life easier. Are the drives ok being "moved" physically that often? We can;t afford to have any reliability issues, and tape stands out in that regard.

Any help is appreciated. I really want to pitch this to him the right way.
Thanks
 
typhoon43 said:
Are the drives ok being "moved" physically that often? We can;t afford to have any reliability issues, and tape stands out in that regard.
Click to expand...

not really considering the critical data
pretty sure electric!sheep would point to the a common practice to enlarge your backup window, basically a large (fixed & redundant) storage array to image the database within the Window available and then conduct the hard Media Backup from there over a longer period of time, since its "offline"

there are alot of different appliances, and management suites to do that, and he might likley have a recommendation or a twist :D

Think your a prime candidate for a free subscription
http://storagemagazine.techtarget.com/
http://storagemagazine.techtarget.com/magQual1/1,294625,sid35,00.html
 
Yes, this is an option I have looked into as well since Backup Exec can do that easily. I'll start looking into a nice dedicated RAID box.

Thanks,

oh and Czar; thanks for the linkage man. I went ahead and signed up. I swear if we could nominate people for Mod of the year, you'd be on there.

No offense to FLECOM, Odoe, oh what the hell... no offense to any of the other Mods. You guys kick arse too. Czar just seems to packet sniff my NIC or something and always has an answer before I'm done hitting submit :D
 
electricsheep answers on Friday :p

electric!sheep said:
I'll try to respond at least every Friday, when I flush my brain from a week of work in the data storage industry.
Click to expand...


and if your lucky UICompE02 will drop by as well (hes in SAS development at LSI)
 
Ack, cant believe i missed/forgot about that (read it last night and forgot about it today). Thanks for being patient ;)
 
I PMd a link to UICompE02 yesterday as he was on breifly

and it certainly sounds impressive
I can "guess" what he will say, that he would have recommended SCSI over the Raptors in that environment (based on his experiences in the LSI Torture chamber)

regarding electricsheep, this is sort of a special "weekend" so ....

could you elaborate the management suite?
 
LSI Torture chamber? And do you mean disk management software, or server management in general?
 
He is a Grand Inquisitor in the LSI Torture chamber, where they stress test poor helpless HDDs in the next gen of SAS RAID controllers,
didnt you ever consider how many hapless HDDs have to die horrible deaths just so we can enjoy reasonable reliability? :p

I meant SAN\NAS management software
 
well im all for torture ;) IPStor software handles the iSCSI side of things, which covers the SAN functionality on the target side, and then just windows server 2003 storage edition for the NAS side, and its built in functionality. As for disk management, IPStor's software handles some of that, and the raid controller the rest of it. Not a high end san/nas environment, but then again it doesnt need to be.
 
Ice Czar said:
this is one Id likely be able to answer at least theoretically

describe some typical backup schemes from a small single site company
throught a mid range example
to a heavily accessed always online database and or mutiple node / location SAN
where the backup windows are very very small
Click to expand...

Looking forward to these answers.

Awesome thread - thanks guys!
 
answers to that could take several thousand pages ;) why not pick up a book? lol...
 
Or dig through thousands upon thousands of newsgroup posts. Most questions have already been answered. This is pretty much why I'm floating back towards software again.
 
Cruithne said:
answers to that could take several thousand pages ;) why not pick up a book? lol...
Click to expand...

Well I'm an MCSE and A+ and an author/writer - but thanks for the tip. :rolleyes:
 
nomar said:
Well I'm an MCSE and A+ and an author/writer - but thanks for the tip. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Im failing to see the relevance to what i said, but i see you took the opportunity to tout your credentials. I was merely stating that those are fairly large topics that i doubt can be answered in their entirety in a succinct enough fashion to warrant posting on a message board.
 
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