Purchasing new SAN, CIFS concerns....

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BoostMR2

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May 29, 2012
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My company is in the market for a new SAN, mostly because of lease expiration and sizing. We are out of space and with growth will be out of our IOPS capabilities.

We currently have a Netapp running both ISCSI and CIFS access, which I have no problem with. It works, it hasen't shown any performance problems in the 9 months I have been here, my only complaint could be that TCO is somewhat high (which is why we leased). So I am looking at Compellent, which is great so far, except for one big issue, no CIFS support.

I can't see running a virtual server as a file server. Bottom line is all of the CIFS access will be running over my virtual environment, instead of being completely seperate like it is now, since NetApp hosts CIFS onboard. I'm worried this will cause a bottleneck, especially in the meantime before we get 10 Gbit capabilities. Any thoughts?
 
You can build a SAN with Solaris 11 or OpenIndiana (OpenSolaris distro). Oracle have several ZFS servers that outperform NetApp servers for a fraction of the cost. If you choose to copy the ZFS server and build it yourself, then you get away much cheaper. Or ask Nexenta (OpenSolaris distro) that have recommendations for hardware, and it will copy the ZFS server too. Nexenta is driving force behind OpenStack, and I suggest you google on OpenStack to learn more about Enterprise storage with free ZFS. Basically, the Oralce ZFS server is a PC with a bunch of SATA disks connected via JBOD.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/20/oracle_zfs7420_specsfs2008/

Here is someone arguing technically, that ZFS is better than NetApps filesystem:
http://storagegaga.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/ontap-vs-zfs/

NetApp vs ZFS:
http://unixconsult.org/wafl/ZFS vs WAFL.html
 
any reason you're against NFS? the windows nfs service isn't the greatest thing since wet t-shirt contests but it does work.
 
madrebel said:
any reason you're against NFS? the windows nfs service isn't the greatest thing since wet t-shirt contests but it does work.
Click to expand...

The Solaris/OpenIndiana/Nexenta CIFS server with a good performance, Windows ACL support, AD support and
ZFS snapshot access via Windows previous version is hard to beat.
 
yeah i know, he bought a compellent though and i will presume he has to get some sort of ROI on that.
 
BoostMR2 said:
My company is in the market for a new SAN, mostly because of lease expiration and sizing. We are out of space and with growth will be out of our IOPS capabilities.

We currently have a Netapp running both ISCSI and CIFS access, which I have no problem with. It works, it hasen't shown any performance problems in the 9 months I have been here, my only complaint could be that TCO is somewhat high (which is why we leased). So I am looking at Compellent, which is great so far, except for one big issue, no CIFS support.

I can't see running a virtual server as a file server. Bottom line is all of the CIFS access will be running over my virtual environment, instead of being completely seperate like it is now, since NetApp hosts CIFS onboard. I'm worried this will cause a bottleneck, especially in the meantime before we get 10 Gbit capabilities. Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

as I learn from myself, the best thing to start are ( can be arguable):
1) to know better you scope/goal.
2) what is the limitation that you would accept.
3) do you need maintenance support.
4) do you need hardware support especially in a critical/emergency situation.
5) do you have backup ready and can be used anytime.
6) your total budget. I would say: estimation budget+ buffered budget(10-20% of estimation budget) = total budget.
7 do you have time constraint. for example: need 6 months to complete all tasks.

Know better with the technology that you would need to implement, for example: read white papers, technical docs, and other medias; ask some small/big compay their services ( you can compare among of them)


as someone posted, NFS service is "wet T-shirt competition" on Windows( do not know on windows 8 ). Windows need CIFS :D,
 
I do understand that knowing all of the companies applications will help, however there is too much to mention at this time, so I will give the vitals.

We have a 3 physical VMWare servers hosting ~30 VMs. The backend is 4 1GB ports on a 1GB switch stack per phys server. I want to limit traffic on these ports.

I am looking for more of a "Best Practices" when it comes to CIFS. Netapp does a great job of hosting CIFS shares onboard. The benefit to this is the CIFS network traffic does not touch my VMWare environment at all, which saves that bandwidth for the vm's connected to NFS volumes.

If a Dell Compellent box is used, then per their recommendation we would set up a virtual server that connected to any NFS volume we wanted to share via CIFS as a Windows Share on this virtual, using Windows Storage Server.

My argument is, this puts all of our CIFS traffic on the virtual environment, since the sharing server is virtual. I would think it would be more appropriate to designate a physical box to connect to the NFS shares, so the traffic stays OFF the virtual environment.

I hope this makes more sense than my original post.
 
Virtualizing the file server gives you a lot more flexibility than placing the shares directly on disks.

Regardless of where the storage is accessing the data from, it's still going over the same access links.

How much CIFS storage are you looking at? Do you have Macs in the environment?
 
I had the same dilemma, I came from a company that used all netapps and they worked well with NFS CIFS and ISCSI all at the same time so it was kind of a pain. I ended up going with dell equallogic at my new employer and virtualized a windows machine and made it my file server. (which i was hesitant about doing)

So far I have been impressed with the performance. I haven't seen any performance issues as of yet but there are only 180 people in my shop.
 
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