New SAN coming soon :)

[Dieselboy]

Our support is up for renewal and to renew for another 3 years is over 10K more expensive than to buy a new SAN which includes 3 year support. So guess what?

Have been quoted for 80TB of capacity in a 2 or 3 RU unit and additional 1.5TB of SSD storage which is apparently managed dynamically by itself. I'll wait and set this up with Jumbo frames into the 10GB switching, and bundle links into resilient LACP channels to the Fabric Interconnects. Looking forward to this one!

I'll also be able to get rid of the QNAP NAS boxes which I've been trying to do since I started with the company, I wont even need to wait for a cleanup op but I'll do that at the same time. Also I can add the SAN to the Active Directory domain and manage the NAS as a SMB3 file server which gets rid of the single point of failure on one Windows file server

[burnyd]

What vendor? I would highly suggest pure.

[wintermute000]

Dibs on the second hand qnaps lolol

[Dieselboy]

Turn of events mean that this is postponed, unfortunately. But, I'll get some more disks for our current units and make a POA for getting jumbo frames enabled as well as bonding the links to the current SAN.

We have NetApp and have no gripes there at all. They have some fancy stuff to be made use of.

Burnyd - to you have any documentation on "Pure"? As far as I'm aware, NetApp is the best in the market. I know this because our NetApp sales person told me so

[Dieselboy]

Dibs on the second hand qnaps lolol

I hate them.

[Nerm]

We run two storage systems here. NetApp and StorSimple. The NetApp system is much faster but the "cloud backup" capabilities of the StorSimple are quite nice.

[burnyd]

Burnyd - to you have any documentation on "Pure"? As far as I'm aware, NetApp is the best in the market. I know this because our NetApp sales person told me so

Netapp has some decent stuff with with solidfire but the older stuff that hasnt changed in forever is just meh...

http://techfieldday.com/companies/pure-storage/

Check out the sfd10 videos if you have the time.  We have a few customers running it Im seriously impressed with it.

[Dieselboy]

This space may change - after a meeting today we might be getting 2 netapps with SSDs.

[mmcgurty]

We are also looking at cheaper NetApp's with all SSD to replace the hella expensive Violin's we have.  The IOPS are lower but the price difference is enough to make stop, look, and listen.  We shall see.

[Dieselboy]

We are also looking at cheaper NetApp's with all SSD to replace the hella expensive Violin's we have.  The IOPS are lower but the price difference is enough to make stop, look, and listen.  We shall see.

Never knew violins were multipurpose! There's nothing like the sound of a violin. Definitely beats the sound of a comms room that's for sure.

On a serious note, do you know what your IOPS are?

My average  for iSCSI is 1.8. And the average for our NFS which is where our VMs disks are is <400. Max is 5k on the busiest and by looking at the CPU use during this burst the CPU is 50% so I think we should get roughly 10k IOPS for IOPS for NFS, although jumbo frames are not enabled so I would expect less CPU hit at the same IOPS.

Also be careful about advertised max IOPS because it might be impossible for you to reach that in your environment.

Are ALL SSD disks a viable option right now? I have heard there's a new type of disk coming out or is already out but although it's 10x faster than SSD it's astronomically expensive. In a few years when this cost comes down, SSD will be equivelant to spinny disks so will be a no brainer then.

[Dieselboy]

Second thought, how good are Cello's? They're bigger than violins so would expect more IOPS and capacity.

[icecream-guy]

Never knew violins were multipurpose! There's nothing like the sound of a violin. Definitely beats the sound of a comms room that's for sure.

you obviously don't have a 12 years old daughter learning to play the violin,     the drone of the data center AC, spinning fans, blowing air, and audible alerts are like a symphony of IT sounds comparatively, and much more pleasurable to the ear.

[mmcgurty]

We are also looking at cheaper NetApp's with all SSD to replace the hella expensive Violin's we have.  The IOPS are lower but the price difference is enough to make stop, look, and listen.  We shall see.

Never knew violins were multipurpose! There's nothing like the sound of a violin. Definitely beats the sound of a comms room that's for sure.

On a serious note, do you know what your IOPS are?

My average  for iSCSI is 1.8. And the average for our NFS which is where our VMs disks are is <400. Max is 5k on the busiest and by looking at the CPU use during this burst the CPU is 50% so I think we should get roughly 10k IOPS for IOPS for NFS, although jumbo frames are not enabled so I would expect less CPU hit at the same IOPS.

Also be careful about advertised max IOPS because it might be impossible for you to reach that in your environment.

Are ALL SSD disks a viable option right now? I have heard there's a new type of disk coming out or is already out but although it's 10x faster than SSD it's astronomically expensive. In a few years when this cost comes down, SSD will be equivelant to spinny disks so will be a no brainer then.

I am not on the Storage team but I hang out with those guys a lot.  It has been a while but I believe they told me the Violin storage was either 400K or 800K.  I am sure this is why they are so expensive, from what I understand there isn't a lot of hardware that can touch those numbers.   From what they are telling us, all SSD is an option now with NetApp.  It must be something new because they were very excited about the cost and sizing.  From what we were told just as an aside in another meeting, the pricing is low enough to displace the Violin and replace all of our NetApp spinning disk in our Data Center with SSD (although not to the IOPS of Violin but to be honest, Violin is overkill for us).  This reduces our  footprint and will allow us to use the spinning disk for the long term storage features (logs older than 7 days, the Desktop's team drivers, ISO's etc.).

[Dieselboy]

This has gone a bit pear shaped, the sales guy has made promises that can't be reached so I'm tendering. Nimble is on the list and I've tried EMC but they failed to get back to me so one can take that as they please. Also had recommendation from a customer who were with netapp but found they were cost prohibitive (cheaper to buy new sans than to renew support for existing hardware by a longshot).

[Dieselboy]

What vendor? I would highly suggest pure.

Hi mate, done a bit of background reading on Pure this morning. I'm very keen to get them in for discussions. I particularly like the flat maintenance free with zero cost hardware upgrades. I wonder what the maintenance frees are though

Thanks for the heads up.