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thetootall
n00b
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2009
- Messages
- 2
While I'm new to this forum I've been working in IT consulting for over 10 years and have implemented a wide variety of storage systems (Fibre Channel/iSCSI/Direct Attached Storage, etc). I've always used by home network as a play ground, allowing some discoveries to spill over into what our business would implement.
In this case we had a customer who needed a substantial amount of storage (~10TB) and had a limited budget ($3000) but didnt want to be limited to the former capacity or speed of their older Dell PowerEdge 2950. Since Dell's MD1000 with 10-1TB drives would have been in the $6000+ range, we started looking at alternatives. Once of our sales managers was on NewEgg and came across the really nice Habey DS-1280 3U 12-bay SAS Expander Direct Attached SAS/SATA JBOD Storage Array. It's a really solid case with nice drie trays that has an optional rail kit for $30 or you can use the mounting arms with 4 mounting holes to affix it nice and snug in a server rack.
We coupled this with 10 of the Western Digital RE3 1TB drives and now had a 9TB of storage on a RAID5 array. Between the drives at $190 a piece and the enclosure for $700, we were still $400 under budget and needed to find a nice controller card. But given my history of working with the Dell PERC 6/E controller with the MD1000 arrays there was no contest that it would be the RAID card we would use.
Not only does it have 2 external connectors, allowing for the management of 16 drives each, but coupled with Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator you have a really nice web management piece for setting up the array and configuring for alerts. The kicker is that these are really solid cards, plus if you keep your eyes on eBay you can find them for no more than $125.
With the storage array and RAID card in hand, I picked up an External Mini SAS 26 pin to 4X Infiniband Cable (SFF-8088 to SFF-8470) to connect the enclosure to the first port of card. Powered up the server and used the OpenManage utility to set a 9TB RAID 5 then with a quick refresh of Disk Management configured my 9TB GBT volume. Not only is the IO lightning fast but coupled with the gigabit backplane on the servers file access to 1-2GB files over the LAN has no problems.
Not only did this test pilot work well for this customer but we took the idea to our datacenter and I also built one for my home use for all of my media. It took a little bit of research to find out how to install the Dell OpenManage software on my 2008 R2 server that wasn't a Dell but I think Dell was smart and realized they have customers who use their storage equipment on non-Dell servers and allowed a work around. I still have 4 open drive bays on my enclosure, and will plan on installing 2TB drives as they come down in price, migrating over the data on my 1TB drive array, and then phase in the rest of the enclosure with 2TB drives (allowing 22TB of data in a 12-bay enclosure on a RAID5).
In the end, for something midrange with expandability of up to 32 drives on a single external SAS card I feel this is a solution thats hard to beat!
In this case we had a customer who needed a substantial amount of storage (~10TB) and had a limited budget ($3000) but didnt want to be limited to the former capacity or speed of their older Dell PowerEdge 2950. Since Dell's MD1000 with 10-1TB drives would have been in the $6000+ range, we started looking at alternatives. Once of our sales managers was on NewEgg and came across the really nice Habey DS-1280 3U 12-bay SAS Expander Direct Attached SAS/SATA JBOD Storage Array. It's a really solid case with nice drie trays that has an optional rail kit for $30 or you can use the mounting arms with 4 mounting holes to affix it nice and snug in a server rack.
We coupled this with 10 of the Western Digital RE3 1TB drives and now had a 9TB of storage on a RAID5 array. Between the drives at $190 a piece and the enclosure for $700, we were still $400 under budget and needed to find a nice controller card. But given my history of working with the Dell PERC 6/E controller with the MD1000 arrays there was no contest that it would be the RAID card we would use.
Not only does it have 2 external connectors, allowing for the management of 16 drives each, but coupled with Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator you have a really nice web management piece for setting up the array and configuring for alerts. The kicker is that these are really solid cards, plus if you keep your eyes on eBay you can find them for no more than $125.
With the storage array and RAID card in hand, I picked up an External Mini SAS 26 pin to 4X Infiniband Cable (SFF-8088 to SFF-8470) to connect the enclosure to the first port of card. Powered up the server and used the OpenManage utility to set a 9TB RAID 5 then with a quick refresh of Disk Management configured my 9TB GBT volume. Not only is the IO lightning fast but coupled with the gigabit backplane on the servers file access to 1-2GB files over the LAN has no problems.
Not only did this test pilot work well for this customer but we took the idea to our datacenter and I also built one for my home use for all of my media. It took a little bit of research to find out how to install the Dell OpenManage software on my 2008 R2 server that wasn't a Dell but I think Dell was smart and realized they have customers who use their storage equipment on non-Dell servers and allowed a work around. I still have 4 open drive bays on my enclosure, and will plan on installing 2TB drives as they come down in price, migrating over the data on my 1TB drive array, and then phase in the rest of the enclosure with 2TB drives (allowing 22TB of data in a 12-bay enclosure on a RAID5).
In the end, for something midrange with expandability of up to 32 drives on a single external SAS card I feel this is a solution thats hard to beat!
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