Datacenter SAN direction

[Liquidkristal]

At work we have a small datacenter, 1 netapp, a couple of equallogics, a starwind and a few synology's

A mix that we have acquired over time, but now itsw time to steer it all in the right direction.

Slower speed storage (files / low usage data bases are going to be synology NAS fodder, nice and simple, we don't need blistering performance from it, but the replication features are nice for recovering for issues that restoring backups are going to take time with etc.

Now the Small san side of things that we have going on, are data centres moving away from iSCSI to FC (or the other way around), is it worth looking into FCoE, or even infiniband as we seek to standardise things over the next 12-18 months

 

[Phog]

iSCSI is gaining popularity, but I still prefer FC. Less overhead.

 

[Razlak]

Our DC is still all FC for anything important. FCoE is used behind the scenes in our Cisco UCS servers, but gets converted to FC for the array connections which seems to be a popular setup.

I can see a use for iSCSI in smaller deployments though, especially if you already have networking knowledge and no FC experience. You do still need to keep the same mind set for redundancy and not try to piggy back it onto your normal network backbone. Storage should have two completely isolated and independent networks, otherwise you're asking for trouble.

Generally I prefer FC, per port costs for 8Gb FC is still less than most good 10GbE switches, and I actually tend to think that FC is easier to manage and less overhead.

 

[kdh]

Our DC is still all FC for anything important. FCoE is used behind the scenes in our Cisco UCS servers, but gets converted to FC for the array connections which seems to be a popular setup.

Same.

I actually moved data centers about a year ago and extended my fabrics using FCoE on 2 10gig links.(cisco 9222s) I actually moved over 500Tbs of VMware with zero downtime(vmotion and storage vmotion) across an entire city. Then another 600Tbs of Oracle Space using ASM.

Iscsi, if you have a separate network to dedicate to it, then go for it. But steer clear of running iscsi and non iscsi traffic over the same pipes. Not saying you can't do it, but there is a chance for congestion. But a few FC switches would do the same easier. Unless you have a hard requirement from a vendor, I wouldn't use Infinitiband. I'm not crapping on it, but I would run FC instead.

I would consolidate your nas/cifs into emc isilon, and FC into block only into an emc VNX.

btw isilon does use infinitband as its backend. hence why I wasn't crapping on it.