Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with SAN and storage

SAN Solution- what the heck am I looking for??

jmd82 — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:40:26 -0800

What options and features or solutions should we be looking for in a SAN solution that will need to last 7-10 years. We're looking to virtualize (VMware of Hyper V, not sure which yet) our old servers this summer and hosting the VMs on a SAN, along with transitioning all of our user Homes & Shares to the SAN. I've been talking to a few companies and realized a small problem: I have no idea what to even ask or which features I should be looking for in a reliable SAN, or options that 3 years from now I'll be kicking myself for not looking at now. Or recommandations for solutions to look at myself on the side. Of course, all the companies say *their* solution is Epic, but I've learned to be skeptical and I am not partial to any one company.

Basically, we'll have about 10 servers (mix of OSX, Windows Linux) feeding off the SAN with about 500 users (95% OSX, 5% Windows- their home folders all use a Mac Pro Server, which is rapidly running out of space. *sigh* Xsan).

Of course, cost is a concern, but I've also convinced TPTB that based off our experience in IT purchasing, choosing a solution that maybe costs some extra money now is worth the cost of eliminating headaches due to choosing an inferior product today.

Help me become a SAN expert

patrad — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:56:15 -0800

I need to quickly become an expert in SAN technology. I'm interviewing for a job shortly where a large majority of the position will be consulting on SAN (storage are network) design. I'm a quick learner but I've only briefly dealt with SANs in past roles.

I'm now aware of SNIA and have combed that site.

I've ordered this book: Designing Storage Area Networks
and this book: Storage Virtualization

If you have any good recommendations for where to find white papers, case studies . . I feel a bevy of real world implementation examples would be great. SAN vs NAS. . VLTs, etc.

Can I create expandable volumes on my setup?

geoff. — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:33:53 -0800

I have a server with a Perc5/i RAID controller and 8 drive bays. I'd like to use it primarily as a storage server, with the idea of buying 4 drives now and expanding later. I'd like to put ESXi on the server and OpenFiler (or FreeNas) ontop of that. I don't need any drive redudancy (there's an attached tape controller), but I'd like to be able to pop in a new drive and expand it like you'd be able to do with LVM. Is this possible? I'm not completely familiar with how ESXi handles storage and if this is even possible with my setup. This is a personal project, but I'd still like to not spend a couple weekends fooling around with this only to find out it is not possible. From the last time I played around in Linux, what I'm proposing seemed simple using LVM, but I know ESXi doesn't run Linux ... I'm not really familiar with how they deal with storage. If at all possible I'd like to be able to run a few VMs and not have this simply as an expensive OpenFiler box.

I'm open to creative ideas if it doesn't work out of the box (running ESXi off a flash drive and treating the RAID controller like a SAN?). I'm also open to other hypervisors, I'm just more familiar with VMWare.

Thanks!

Pimp my database!

H. Roark — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:07:45 -0800

Oracle / Storage geeks: What are the alternatives to exadata for high-performance I/O with a rac system? We are getting pretty close to buying an exadata setup and I'm trying to find viable alternatives that are cost-effective and deliver similar performance. We need to be running RAC for load balancing and fault tolerance, so I believe direct attached storage like SSD-arrays is not an option. Buying a dedicated SAN seems to be lower performance and higher cost than exadata. For benchmarking the exadata system we are looking at (1/4 rack) delivers 4.5GB/sec sustained I/O to disk. Our current SAN (which is overly shared) gives us approx 150MB/sec and our 4-nic dnfs systems to a netapp runs at approx 350MB/sec.

So assuming we need at least 3GB/sec and it cant be direct-attached what are other good options out there?

Lets just ignore the other features of exadata that make it fast like smart-scan. Thanks!

How to calculate Rate of Change

daveyt — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 06:20:38 -0800

How can i calculate (or make a good approximation) of how much some data has changed in bytes? I have a folder with (currently) 140GB of 300-400 lotus notes mail files. Whilst the total data 140GB stays roughly around that mark, the actual number of bytes that is changing daily is harder to calculate.

All this data is on a netapp SAN by the way, in a LUN, mounted on a Windows 2003 server.

I'm basically trying to calculate the Rate Of Change (ROC) so i can work through this doc . Any help appreciated.

Cheap Short-Term Storage Near San Francisco?

gum — Wed, 02 May 2007 01:11:23 -0800

I'm traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area with a van and a trailer, and my plans for where to put all of this when I arrive have fallen through. Where should I store my stuff? I can ditch the trailer and the contents of the van in a storage unit anywhere within two or three hours of San Francisco and not think about them for two or three months.

Where in the circle of San Francisco are the cheapest storage places?

Cost-effective, shared storage for Mac?

brundlefly — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 11:41:02 -0800

Cost effective, shared storage for Mac? I work for a small production company that uses two G5s to edit video. We want both machines to share a large central drive (a RAID, I suppose). What's the best way to go about this? I looked into Xsan, but that appears to be out of our price range. Are there more cost effective alternatives?

Help me purchase a SAN

stovenator — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:10:34 -0800

Can you help me with the purchase of a SAN for my small to medium sized business? We're looking to attach 4-6 servers to ~2-3 TB of storage space. Our budget is a little flexible, but it looks like it will be <$30,000. We've looked at the HP MSA1500, and the Dell (EMC) AX100. We like the price point of SATA, but we're going to eventually want to move our MS SQL server to the SAN, so SATA only probably won't work. We are open to using both SATA and SCSI, but don't know if SATA will work for anything other than our file server. The MSA1500 supports both SATA and SCSI in a mixed configuration, but it doesn't appear to have the performance we think will be necessary.

How do the IBM DS400 and DS4300 compare to these? Are there others we should be looking at? Are we going to be able to find something that will give us the reliability and speed we want in this price range? Is there a forum where specific SAN solutions are discussed at length so we can better choose a solution?