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Best way to consolidate file servers

My office has about 8TB of network storage that is spread between 5 different file servers. Because we are managing islands of storage, we keep having to migrate data to and from different servers when one of them fills up. I want to setup a file server with enough disk capacity to all contain 8 TB of our current data and leave an additional 4-6 TB of room for growth. To accomplish the consolidation, we are considering setting up a file sharing cluster using Dell servers and an MD3000 (will need to slave on at least one MD1000). I have a couple of concerns that I do not know how to address and I hope someone out there can make a recommendation.

My first concern is with performance. I do know that RAID5 performance peaks when you are using 9 disks and I cant build a 12+ TB disk array with 9 disks. I cant afford to run RAID 10, so I think that RAID 5+0 is my only option. Is RAID 5+0 a good choice for a volume of this size? Does anyone know if there is an optimal number of RAID5 elements I should use in the stripe? Is it even advisable to create a volume this large?

My other concern is with expansion. The company I work for is entering a growth spurt and the extra 4TB of storage will be full in 12-18 months. The easy solution would be to purchase more storage now, but I cant get budget for that. Can you expand the capacity of a RAID 5+0 array? If not, what suggestions do you have for managing additional arrays? I do not want to recreate the storage islands we have now.

Thanks in advance for you assistance,
Wildadmin

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ASAdmin

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Wildadmin

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We had to disqualify SAN because of the cost. We did demo an HP All-in-One (NAS/SAN device) and determined that the simplified interface did not allow the detailed level of management we needed.

Assuming the NAS can participate in our DFS and can be backed up by either Backup Exec or by MS DPM, I am not opposed to using a NAS device.

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AJermo

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Member_2_231077

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ASAdmin

We use NAS from NetAPP and it is working pretty good for us. We are able to authenticate against the AD(It uses NDMP protocol) and yes we backit up from Veritas Netbackup so you should be able to use Backup exec, to back it up. You can configure it to participate it in the DFS as well. There is a bit of configuration that is needed for DFS and backup exec.
The fallowing link might help you.
http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/whitepaper.aspx?docid=129073

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Lee W, MVP

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Member_2_231077

Disks keep coming down in price so rather than spend the money now I'd expand later. You can even hot-add a SAS storage chassis to Windows storage server so there's no benefit in SAN unless it's cheaper which it generally isn't.

Lee W, MVP

SANs provide several advantages over just machines with disks. Among them, they usually offer features not available in standard operating systems, including Single-instance storage and the ability to be used in a cluster (not all SANs provide all features, but these, especially the second one, are common). They also tend to be easier to expand.

Member_2_231077

Tell me one SAN that offers SIS. SANs generally don't even know the filesystem that an OS puts on top of them. WSS does however offer SIS. Clustering is not necessary if you use other replication programs like doubletake. They're not easier to expand, you have first expand the SAN and then the OS that's using it so you have to learn two sets of commands for two OSs, if you use a Windows based DAS box you only have to learn one OS!

Computer101

Forced accept.

Computer101
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