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I've been struggling to find a place for an unbiased opinion, so I figured I'd post on the good old Hard Forum. If you can put up with my novel, I'd really appreciate some feedback from my fellow IT brothers. For some reason I find it really difficult to trust vendors to give me an unbiased opinion...crazy huh?
I'm fairly new to the SMB/Enterprise sector, and I'm struggling with what to do with our storage. We are currently running an EMC AX4-5i, loaded down with 33 450gb 15k SAS drives. I have it broken down into a Raid 5 disk pool for backing up to, and a R10 disk pool that has all vmware datastores, VMs, file shares, etc loaded on to it. My problem started when I noticed almost no improvement in the growing of the R10 disk pool. When I first started, everything was split out onto multiple R5 disk pools. I read that best practice on the AX4 was to combine everything into one pool, so that every request was hitting the full performance of the array. Sounded like a great idea, so I started with a small R10 pool and began to grow it. I ran HD Tune Pro and PerformanceTest against the pool as I added each drive, but after only 6 drives it became clear that some of the tests had flat lined. I figured there had to be a bottleneck somewhere. Being an iSCSI array, I first turned to the network and saw high utilization on the ports. So I setup round robin in VMware, and tried the tests again. This then gave me 50-60% utilization max on each port, and no improvement in tests. The R10 pool is now at 18 drives, and still performs poorly. I have tried and read everything, talked with EMC for months, and I'm still not sure if the bottleneck lies in the SAN storage processors, the gigabit ports, or somewhere else in my network. I will be giving the SAN its own dedicated cisco 3560 switch soon, so I will see if that helps. EMC has been 0 help, and I'm really so tired of their non-service, which has been a big driving factor to get a new SAN. EMC says I'm getting good performance on IOmeter tests, but doesn't want to address the fact that I get worse numbers in HD Tune pro than the guy in this thread - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1582718 who is using 7200rpm sata disks. Crappy performance, horrible service, no future support, no new features, and it's not hard to see why I'm looking at getting a new SAN.
My network itself really isn't all that big though. 8 physical servers, 3 of which host about 4 or 5 VMs. We only have about 100 users total, but all are all extremely heavy on the network. Its a construction company, so there are constant huge reports run against several different SQL instances. We use Exchange, SharePoint, 2 terminal servers, and quite a few applications. The owners are generous with our budget because time is very important to the people in the office who are constantly in and out, and are responsible for commanding another 400 people in the field. Waiting 20 minutes or more for some of the reports to run can be a huge slow down for a lot of people, so I really work hard to make sure everything is running as fast as possible. Storage wise we only use about 3.5TB, which gives us about 1 TB to grow on our current system. We have another 3TB of fast drives used for backup. Would have liked to have just gone with 1TB 7200rpm drives for backup, but with EMC discontinuing everything on our 2 year "old" system, they were hard to find and crazy expensive.
So we've been looking for a new SAN. Compellent has been pushed hard, and I love all the features that come with it. Reviews seem to be pretty good online, and the price only makes me cringe a little bit (until I look at their drive costs). Still, I know there are a lot of options out there. I also cant really see me just throwing away our old AX4, or selling it for a crazy low price. Offsite DR has been a big goal of ours, and not even EMC supports using the AX4 for offsite replication to one of our remote offices. This lead me to the thought of building my own SAN for a little while, but the two software vendors I found with the most features (Starwind and Datacore) are pretty expensive themselves. To add to the confusion, I found someone willing to sell me their Compellent Series 20 with more drives than we will need for quite some time, for super cheap. It's all quite confusing. I certainly don't want to rush into this, and risk getting another crap SAN, or even waste money on something we didn't actually need.
Any advice or recommendations are greatly appreciated!
I'm fairly new to the SMB/Enterprise sector, and I'm struggling with what to do with our storage. We are currently running an EMC AX4-5i, loaded down with 33 450gb 15k SAS drives. I have it broken down into a Raid 5 disk pool for backing up to, and a R10 disk pool that has all vmware datastores, VMs, file shares, etc loaded on to it. My problem started when I noticed almost no improvement in the growing of the R10 disk pool. When I first started, everything was split out onto multiple R5 disk pools. I read that best practice on the AX4 was to combine everything into one pool, so that every request was hitting the full performance of the array. Sounded like a great idea, so I started with a small R10 pool and began to grow it. I ran HD Tune Pro and PerformanceTest against the pool as I added each drive, but after only 6 drives it became clear that some of the tests had flat lined. I figured there had to be a bottleneck somewhere. Being an iSCSI array, I first turned to the network and saw high utilization on the ports. So I setup round robin in VMware, and tried the tests again. This then gave me 50-60% utilization max on each port, and no improvement in tests. The R10 pool is now at 18 drives, and still performs poorly. I have tried and read everything, talked with EMC for months, and I'm still not sure if the bottleneck lies in the SAN storage processors, the gigabit ports, or somewhere else in my network. I will be giving the SAN its own dedicated cisco 3560 switch soon, so I will see if that helps. EMC has been 0 help, and I'm really so tired of their non-service, which has been a big driving factor to get a new SAN. EMC says I'm getting good performance on IOmeter tests, but doesn't want to address the fact that I get worse numbers in HD Tune pro than the guy in this thread - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1582718 who is using 7200rpm sata disks. Crappy performance, horrible service, no future support, no new features, and it's not hard to see why I'm looking at getting a new SAN.
My network itself really isn't all that big though. 8 physical servers, 3 of which host about 4 or 5 VMs. We only have about 100 users total, but all are all extremely heavy on the network. Its a construction company, so there are constant huge reports run against several different SQL instances. We use Exchange, SharePoint, 2 terminal servers, and quite a few applications. The owners are generous with our budget because time is very important to the people in the office who are constantly in and out, and are responsible for commanding another 400 people in the field. Waiting 20 minutes or more for some of the reports to run can be a huge slow down for a lot of people, so I really work hard to make sure everything is running as fast as possible. Storage wise we only use about 3.5TB, which gives us about 1 TB to grow on our current system. We have another 3TB of fast drives used for backup. Would have liked to have just gone with 1TB 7200rpm drives for backup, but with EMC discontinuing everything on our 2 year "old" system, they were hard to find and crazy expensive.
So we've been looking for a new SAN. Compellent has been pushed hard, and I love all the features that come with it. Reviews seem to be pretty good online, and the price only makes me cringe a little bit (until I look at their drive costs). Still, I know there are a lot of options out there. I also cant really see me just throwing away our old AX4, or selling it for a crazy low price. Offsite DR has been a big goal of ours, and not even EMC supports using the AX4 for offsite replication to one of our remote offices. This lead me to the thought of building my own SAN for a little while, but the two software vendors I found with the most features (Starwind and Datacore) are pretty expensive themselves. To add to the confusion, I found someone willing to sell me their Compellent Series 20 with more drives than we will need for quite some time, for super cheap. It's all quite confusing. I certainly don't want to rush into this, and risk getting another crap SAN, or even waste money on something we didn't actually need.
Any advice or recommendations are greatly appreciated!
.