Best IBM Complete SAN configuration.

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lundrog

[H]ard|Gawd
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We are looking for a complete IBM SAN replacement for our PACS system.

Currently we have two X336 IBM servers connected via fiber channel to a inline corp brand SAN, with 16 X 300gb SAS Drives. ( all with a expiring warranty, and the array company has just sold to another company )

However, with our current image usage, we were quoted at needing 6-9 TB's of storage in 5-7 years.

Therefore, I need a scalable system, with a fairly low starting cost, but huge upgrade potential.


I was looking at the IBM BladeCenter S Chassis.

It supports up to 3.6 TB of SAS drives with modules, per chassis. Can you team more than one Chassis to make a single large partition? 3.6 TB X 2 or X 3.

This would also let us add servers as needed for the future.

If so, that would give us room for now, and we could always add the DS4000 series of SAN. But the DS4200 series of SAN, with a maxed SAS configuration is quite expensive.


OR

Are there other options that are worth looking at from IBM?

An ideal system, would be something that we could start out with about 4-6 TB of SAS drives, and could move up to 10-15 TB if needed. With something like scalable partitioning, and raid for redundancy.

This system will only be used for our PACS, and we will use our existing SAN for departmental and house wide use.

The software vendor would prefer us to use IBM systems.



Thanks
 
I just deployed a iSCSI SAN for a client of mine with a similar situation.
I put in two new dell 2950's with 2x quad cores and 8gb ram
for the SAN i used Dell Equallogic Virtualized Storage(one of the coolest, easiest, complete SAN packages i have ever used it was so easy it literally took 20 minutes to setup)
2 arrays with 16x300GB 15k SAS drives in a RAID5 with 2 hot spares.
Using this system with 300gb 15k SAS you can expand up to 57.6 TB
There is also a 10k SAS option with up to 78TB
and a SATA option with up to 192 TB
I love this setup so much that unless fibre channel is a necessity i don't recommend anything else to my clients.

I realize its not IBM stuff but the equalogic array is not vendor specific and is really its own line and software. it was purchased by dell so they could capture this market segment.
 
Why not consider the 3400 series of storage. The DS4200 is only supports SATA drives...

The 3400 is....
- Expandable to 48 SAS disk with 4 enclosures.
 
evilmedic said:
Why not consider the 3400 series of storage. The DS4200 is only supports SATA drives...

The 3400 is....
- Expandable to 48 SAS disk with 4 enclosures.
Click to expand...


Alright, and blade vs standalone server opinion?
 
My vote is for a NetApp solution. More complete storage platform that will allow you do to more than just iscsi or fcp if your needs change or if you don't want to maintain front end servers to a back end san to serve data.
 
Why don't consider Virtual Servers (VMWare ESX Server more exactly). We currently have 2 IBM machines that are fault-tolerant and host many virtual servers. Once on that route you never look back. They are connected to a DS3400 SAN that currently supports 12 SAS/SATA drives + 3 expansion packs (that meens 48 drives in total).

With virtualization it's more easy to manage and allocate this space dynamically .
 
I second the Netapp advice, if you want to go with IBM they sell a rebranded series of Netapps. We run an IBM n5300 for our email and esx environment datastores at the moment. The A-SIS (Block level deduplication) and Nearstore licensing is now no charge on the n5300 as of March (and the Netapp version, I believe FAS3020 is the model). It supports SATA and SAS drives with archiving capabilities for bulk data storage (which is 90% of what PACS does anyways from what I've seen in our environment) and the block level de-duplication would probably save you 20-40% space-wise with your imaging which would probably offset the additional expense of going with a real SAN rather than a bunch of drive arrays shackled to servers (talk about additional points of failure, Doctors just love downtime ;). FYI watch out on some of the 4000 series IBM SAN, they are phasing out a fair number of those lines in the next couple years so unless you like buying refurbed drawers of disk in 2-3 years I'd grill your IBM rep before committing to anything. And yes, IBM really does sell drawers of refurbed disk as your only option after a line is discontinued. As an alternate option you might consider looking at Data Pillar SAN, we aren't running one at the moment but have been hearing good things about their price/performance ratios from other institutions/sysadmins.
 
Netapp is crap. It's doubly crap for your usage. Period. You should not be wasting time and people should not be wasting your time with such bad advice.

You want to start with an IBM DS4700 most likely, as that's the current. Skip the DS4800, it's more than you need and I can't say more than that. The DS4700 scales well past Netapp for much, much less - Netapp is going to cost you over $200K in licensing bull alone - which it's proponents always refuse to acknowledge or mention. It also requires a lot more drives, because it's software RAID. You can take a DS4700 home fully licensed for ~$150K with the disks.

Future scaling, the only answer is the IBM SVC. Contrary to the opinion of people who don't do it for a living.

So sayeth the Storage Administrator. (IBM DS4800, DS4700, DS4500, DS4200, Symmetrix, Clariion CX600, CX500, CX300, Netapp (disposed of.))
 
What about Compellent? My company is looking at SANs and our CTO thinks Compellent offers the best solution right now. I'm not 100% savvy on the technology they're offering, but it was something to the effect of tiered storage (faster drives + slower drives) with software to move your data according to usage (data accessed more frequently on faster drives, on outer edges of spindle, etc.). I want to say they quoted us $50-80k for 5TB or so with a mix of 300GB 15k's and 750GB 7200 drives...

We're also looking at blade servers and recently got quotes from IBM, Dell and HP... of course, they were all around the same price ($40-45k for enclosure + 5 2x2.5Ghz Quad core blades). Anybody know the best place to research server solutions? I have been searching for reviews/comparisons (since I work at a small business of only 8 employees) but have had little luck so far.

Sorry if this post seems like rambling.. I have just wanted to research/talk to someone about this for a while and have had little luck other than manufacturer-produced information online.
 
Wow, nice flame on Netapp. That being said we own a both a DS4700 and a N5300 (Well that and an 8100, two DS4500s, and a 4 node SVC cluster). The n5300 with 4 drawers of 300Gb 10k disk dual filer heads with 4Gb of cache and the rack/pdus ran us $160k last year. The DS4700 drawers cost roughly 50% more than the n5300 drawers directly from IBM so not really a cost savings there. Not really sure where you are coming up with "well over 200k" but whatever. As for the SVC heads, unless you have a huge budget and plan on having multiple SAN in your environment that really isn't a purpose besides costing you "well over 200k" for the SVCs to beat a dead phrase. I will admit that storage virtualization is priceless when you are presenting from multiple SAN to multiple servers but IBM is about as expensive as you can get. I would still recommend a Netapp over a DS4700 especially with the Deduplication and Snapshot capability (We Snap 12Tb and verify worth of Exchange data every night in less than 2 hours without any performance hit to end users).

The cult of IBM SAN is strong with some people/vendors but I also wouldn't hesitate to look at other companies as well. HP has some fairly good offerings these days as does EMC, although I can't comment on anything other than the MSA2000FC which is not really a SAN so much as an oversize disk array. We just purchased one when they came out a couple months ago with two drawers of 146Gb 15k drives and 2 drawers of 750Gb SATA which is the max one pair of controllers can handle. We use it for our test lab ESX servers at the moment, no performance issues the total setup ran us about $40k (Ironically the 146Gb 15k drawers are less than the 750Gb SATA by about $1000k). I don't think I'd recommend an MSA2000FC for PACS though as you really need something that can handle a couple racks of disk down the road.

I'm not sure as I'm not an applications guy but it seems to me that PACS supports archiving of older imaging to a secondary storage medium like WORM/Tape, usually you can harness that capability to push older data off onto something like SATA disk or a virtual tape library to save yourself a fair amount of money. With Nearstore on the Netapp you could run several drawers of 10k disk for your primary live storage and add drawers of SATA as you filled up your 10k for bulk data storage if PACS does support archiving. The vendors love to make you purchase racks of 10k disk (especially if your PACS vendor also sells disk, I wouldn't buy it from them) claiming you'll need it for speed. Frankly the type of data your deal with on PACS is not very random and in large chunks so the only randomness that enters the field is the number of simultaneous users who will probably complain about slowness even if you hooked up drawer of 15k disk directly to their workstation (at least thats been my experience when it comes to dealing with our radiology doctors).

There is a good online community around Netapp products you could probably hit up and find others that specifically operate their PACS on a Netapp here: http://communities.netapp.com/index.jspa

Good luck!
 
jcazes, never had the opportunity to deal with Compellant, their solution sounds a lot like Data Pillar as far as the whole multiple tiers within one rack statement. There is a fair amount of options in that 30-60k budget range for the smaller systems that handle 4-8 drawers so I'd shop around. Get ahold of Compellant and talk to one of their techs (thats what I normally try to do as the sales people are full of fluff and really can't tell you technically why their product would work for you) I'm sure they'd be more than happy to ramble at length about their product. On the blade servers, we have a rack of the IBM HS21 blade systems and we just purchasing two chassis full of HP blades for a Citrix deployment. All in all we like the HP blades better if nothing else but for the hot swap drives on the front of them instead of having to pull out the entire blade (with a downtime) to swap out a lousy bad drive. Also all of our IBM chassis have been plagued with issues with the management modules rebooting/losing their configuration on their own. IBM has given us several firmware fixes for them but has admitted that its been on issue on the management modules we are running (yet hasn't volunteered to swap them out for something that works... nice huh?). That being said I've also heard good things about IBM blades from other admins, just no luck for us though. The HP blades do tend to run less than the IBM counterparts and the chassis is definitely more scalable interconnect-wise.
 
AreEss said:
Netapp is crap. It's doubly crap for your usage. Period. You should not be wasting time and people should not be wasting your time with such bad advice.

You want to start with an IBM DS4700 most likely, as that's the current. Skip the DS4800, it's more than you need and I can't say more than that. The DS4700 scales well past Netapp for much, much less - Netapp is going to cost you over $200K in licensing bull alone - which it's proponents always refuse to acknowledge or mention. It also requires a lot more drives, because it's software RAID. You can take a DS4700 home fully licensed for ~$150K with the disks.

Future scaling, the only answer is the IBM SVC. Contrary to the opinion of people who don't do it for a living.

So sayeth the Storage Administrator. (IBM DS4800, DS4700, DS4500, DS4200, Symmetrix, Clariion CX600, CX500, CX300, Netapp (disposed of.))
Click to expand...

Didn't read past your first sentence since you threw your credibility away with it.

EDIT: I was in a rush earlier, but I also vote for NetApp. They have a single OS that they use across their entire product line, and pretty much all of their FAS line meaning huge savings in time learning how to use them. You can also handle all types of storage needs with one device without having to buy more actual equipment if you want to add one feature. You just pickup the license and run. The savings in time and effort is tremendous.
 
Hey lundrog, mind if I ask who's PACS system your using? I just happen to be a PACS Technical Instructor Siemens. Sorry, for digressing, interesting to see another PACS guy around.
I'll have to agree with some others here and say look into NetApp. I just recently replaced a smaller raid on one of my systems with that. I went from a 2TB SanBloc, which I would not recommend at all, to a 1TB NetApp. It's for training purposes so it's not a big deal that I got a smaller unit. Anyway, this thing is really nice. I don't remember the exact model, but it's FAS something.
Upon delivery, we had a NetApp rep come in and try to sell us on more products. I must admit, he made one sound very appealing. They deliver some kind of Head or Control unit, that can interface with almost any Deep Archive, JukeBox, TapeLibrary out there. He said they have really been sellinng a lot for media migrations.
Anyway, digress again. NetApp is something to look at. Also, any reason for only IBM, contracts or something? We have recently started using more HP server hardware and I have been really impressed with that. I just got a proliant ML580 and it is a beast, 2 dual core xeons, 12GB RAM, 8TB of raid, with iLo and a bunch of other nice features.

Also, something I just thought about. As you mentioned earlier, if you want to start with one array and keep expanding, you should look into purchasing Veritas Foundation Suite. We use this on our scalable systems. Veritas, among other things, is a really nice volume management software. It's really quite unbelievable how this software can be configured. It is also very good for High Availability. I've got a test system right now that has 2 physically seperate servers, both accessing one FC Raid. It's setup so that if one server goes down the other can start instantly where the bad one left off. The servers just have a basic operating system and Veritas install, the raid actually contains the Application software, Databases, and images. It's really quite nice.

Just my .02 cents.
 
If you guys want a good understanding of LIST pricing and get a performance metric you should check out http://www.storageperformance.org.

Just for Mr. AreEss please review the following reports:

Your beloved IBM DS4XXX:

http://www.storageperformance.org/results/a00050_IBM-_DS4800_SPC1_full-disclosure_ar1.pdf

vs

A NetApp FAS3170:

http://www.storageperformance.org/results/a00066_NetApp_FAS3170_full-disclosure.pdf

With the same amount of drives, the IBM came in at 627k vs 605k for the NetApp. Both fully licensed and 3 years of service. But as far as performance goes, the NetApp was significantly faster at 60k SPC-1 IOPS vs 45k for the IBM.

I've used both, and from your list I've used the EMC product line as well. All have their +'s and -'s but NetApp is by far the best bang for the buck, easiest to use, and complete solution in a box. Good luck with your gear.

M
 
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