hey all, i have a question for you. i've been running WHS at home but was looking to upgrade to a solution using a SAN based on what a friend has told me about his and such. problem is, he livs like 5 states away so its not exactly easy to work on figuring out how to up such a thing. I've done some googling on the subject but haven't found anything of much help, tried san setup and basically got stuff discussing iscsi vs something else, tried googling SAN's for noobs and didn't come up with much. so i wondering if somebody couldn't help describe the parts needed to setup a SAN and some good cheaper solutions.
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SAN's
- Thread starter moose517
- Start date
There are two options when it comes to SANs.
One: buy a SAN from someone like EMC, Compellent, etc and have a solid robust system to be the back end of your network.
Two: cobble together your own system using a computer as a controller using something like OpenFiler.
Yes there are a few in between options, but for most of those you get the downside of PC hardware with only the minimal support of a fly by night company.
About the only cheap option I would consider for a business is a Dell Powervault md3000i.
For home, something like OpenFiler works, but you don't get many of the advantages of a real SAN (snapshot management, gold images, single instance storage, tiered performance, overcommitment of storage etc etc)
One: buy a SAN from someone like EMC, Compellent, etc and have a solid robust system to be the back end of your network.
Two: cobble together your own system using a computer as a controller using something like OpenFiler.
Yes there are a few in between options, but for most of those you get the downside of PC hardware with only the minimal support of a fly by night company.
About the only cheap option I would consider for a business is a Dell Powervault md3000i.
For home, something like OpenFiler works, but you don't get many of the advantages of a real SAN (snapshot management, gold images, single instance storage, tiered performance, overcommitment of storage etc etc)
As we have been discussing this in another thread here goes.
1: How much is your budget. Personally I like the MD3000i from Dell or the HP Storageworks MSA2312 / MSA2324 but those are $3k + setups. For business they work great, for home use unless you got a lot of cash to blow it isn't cost effective.
2: Why do you actually want a SAN? I know that you say that you have a friend with one, but why do you want one? Personally I want one just to have one, but after looking over SAN, DAS, NAS, and internal storage I found that internal storage for my server is the most cost effective.
3: Do you have multiple servers that will make use of the storage. The whole point of a SAN (Storage area network) is to allow multiple servers to connect to a central storage point for high density, high availability, and high scalability. If you have a single server a SAN really isn't the best option, DAS or internal storage would be the better option.
A normal SAN setup would look like this. Servers 1 - 4 connected to a SAN switch (for instance a Dell Powerconnect 54xx or HP Procurve 2910al), then your actual storage device (Say a Dell Powervault MD3000i) connected to the switch as well. This allows Servers 1-4 to access the SAN all at the same time. Even though each LUN can only be accessed by one server at a time, the idea is that if one server goes down, another server can mount the LUN and pick up the down servers place that way even though you loose a physical server you don't loose the storage in the downtime. In a 1 server environment SAN is not the best option as if your one access point to the SAN is down even though you could mount the iSCSI target somewhere else technically (though that computer would need a NIC on the same VLAN) your storage is not accessible. A DAS would be a better option as you just need to unplug the SAS/SATA/SCSI cable and plug it into another computer, share out the volume and vola your back in business.
1: How much is your budget. Personally I like the MD3000i from Dell or the HP Storageworks MSA2312 / MSA2324 but those are $3k + setups. For business they work great, for home use unless you got a lot of cash to blow it isn't cost effective.
2: Why do you actually want a SAN? I know that you say that you have a friend with one, but why do you want one? Personally I want one just to have one, but after looking over SAN, DAS, NAS, and internal storage I found that internal storage for my server is the most cost effective.
3: Do you have multiple servers that will make use of the storage. The whole point of a SAN (Storage area network) is to allow multiple servers to connect to a central storage point for high density, high availability, and high scalability. If you have a single server a SAN really isn't the best option, DAS or internal storage would be the better option.
A normal SAN setup would look like this. Servers 1 - 4 connected to a SAN switch (for instance a Dell Powerconnect 54xx or HP Procurve 2910al), then your actual storage device (Say a Dell Powervault MD3000i) connected to the switch as well. This allows Servers 1-4 to access the SAN all at the same time. Even though each LUN can only be accessed by one server at a time, the idea is that if one server goes down, another server can mount the LUN and pick up the down servers place that way even though you loose a physical server you don't loose the storage in the downtime. In a 1 server environment SAN is not the best option as if your one access point to the SAN is down even though you could mount the iSCSI target somewhere else technically (though that computer would need a NIC on the same VLAN) your storage is not accessible. A DAS would be a better option as you just need to unplug the SAS/SATA/SCSI cable and plug it into another computer, share out the volume and vola your back in business.
1) well price would depend, as of right now i have 17TB of data and was wanting to get higher capacity, however if a cheap SAN solution is gonna cost that much for smaller HDD's then i'll probably stick with using SAS expanders.
2) i'm not totally sold on the idea of SAN's but based on what my buddy has said it would be much better than my current solution as far as redundancy goes, at the same time i want to learn the tech if i wanna go into a job doing such, so it would be mainly for fun and learning at home for now.
3) i have an idea of more than one server that i would like to use it, currently i have a 1TB hard drive on a supermicro server thats only purpose is mail and SVN duties, but if either grow to over that size i would like to be able to expand storage capacity needed for them or shrink as needed. and also again for lab use, learning how to setup that kind of stuff i would probably use VM's on a server to study that kind of stuff in depth.
Thanks for that more descriptive setup as well. I've kind of assumed thats about how it would be setup but was never sure on the specifics, so thats perfect.
2) i'm not totally sold on the idea of SAN's but based on what my buddy has said it would be much better than my current solution as far as redundancy goes, at the same time i want to learn the tech if i wanna go into a job doing such, so it would be mainly for fun and learning at home for now.
3) i have an idea of more than one server that i would like to use it, currently i have a 1TB hard drive on a supermicro server thats only purpose is mail and SVN duties, but if either grow to over that size i would like to be able to expand storage capacity needed for them or shrink as needed. and also again for lab use, learning how to setup that kind of stuff i would probably use VM's on a server to study that kind of stuff in depth.
Thanks for that more descriptive setup as well. I've kind of assumed thats about how it would be setup but was never sure on the specifics, so thats perfect.