taltomare
asked on
iSCSI San hardware recommendations
Hello All,
My company is currently looking into centralized storage for our Exchange, FTP and production data. I've done some research over the past couple of weeks and figured between the budget and performance needs I'm faced with that an iSCSI SAN solution would work best and I'm looking for hardware recommendations for Gigabyte switches, iSCSI SAN devices, HBA / TOE adapters, software or hardware initators and anything else that I might be missing.
I'd rather stay away from installing software on a Windows base platform that makes it an iSCSI target. Thanks for any input on this subject.
My company is currently looking into centralized storage for our Exchange, FTP and production data. I've done some research over the past couple of weeks and figured between the budget and performance needs I'm faced with that an iSCSI SAN solution would work best and I'm looking for hardware recommendations for Gigabyte switches, iSCSI SAN devices, HBA / TOE adapters, software or hardware initators and anything else that I might be missing.
I'd rather stay away from installing software on a Windows base platform that makes it an iSCSI target. Thanks for any input on this subject.
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taltomare;
If you have a limited budget, iSCSI believe it or not is going to cost you a lot more for the hardware. The drive array being the biggest single cost, then the gigabit switch so you can plug multiple iSCSI cards into the array, then the cards themselves. Since we are talking about a 1 gigabit bandwidth limit, 1 gigabit fibre is an option. The _only_ reason to use iSCSI instead of Fibre would be to allow for external devices to access the array (say through the internet) for block level access (for example, you have a cluster, and one machine is remote to the internal network).
If you price the equipment (you could even eBay all the items) 1 gigabit Fibre Channel will always come out cheaper and the speed will be the same or better. Don't get me wrong, I love iSCSI, but it is usually used for a specific purpose (like the one I described) and not for an internal SAN solution (because Fibre is cheaper).
If you are commited to iSCSI, then the option I gave in the first reply is the cheapest route you will find that actually works (more or less because you don't have to purchase an expensive iSCSI only array).
If you have a limited budget, iSCSI believe it or not is going to cost you a lot more for the hardware. The drive array being the biggest single cost, then the gigabit switch so you can plug multiple iSCSI cards into the array, then the cards themselves. Since we are talking about a 1 gigabit bandwidth limit, 1 gigabit fibre is an option. The _only_ reason to use iSCSI instead of Fibre would be to allow for external devices to access the array (say through the internet) for block level access (for example, you have a cluster, and one machine is remote to the internal network).
If you price the equipment (you could even eBay all the items) 1 gigabit Fibre Channel will always come out cheaper and the speed will be the same or better. Don't get me wrong, I love iSCSI, but it is usually used for a specific purpose (like the one I described) and not for an internal SAN solution (because Fibre is cheaper).
If you are commited to iSCSI, then the option I gave in the first reply is the cheapest route you will find that actually works (more or less because you don't have to purchase an expensive iSCSI only array).
Disclaimer: I'm a big believer in FC SANs, but that wasn't your questions :)
You stated that: "I know the performance varence between the two is a factor for most situations but the iSCSI is the path that my company has decided on at this time." This is not going to be a high-performance solution, not even close...
$6,000 for a basic iSCSI SAN
=
$5,000 for the HDS SMS100 (6 drives, smallest config, single-controller)
- PDF (http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/ds-hitachi-simple-modular-storage-100.pdf)
- WEB (http://www.hds.com/solutions/smb/index.html?WT.ac=HP_SP1_SMB)
- NEWS (http://www.infostor.com/display_article/309056/23/ARTCL/Display/none/Hitachi-ships-entry-level-iSCSI-array/)
$1,000 for nics, switches, cabling, ...
If you go for iSCSI nics with a hardware protocol accelration, cards will be much more but throughput goes up and CPU utilization on the client side won't spike when doing fast transfers.
Dual-controllers would give you redundancy on the storage side (and extra expense), but only if you use an iscsi driver that supports multipathing, or add-on multipathing software (extra expense).
You stated that: "I know the performance varence between the two is a factor for most situations but the iSCSI is the path that my company has decided on at this time." This is not going to be a high-performance solution, not even close...
$6,000 for a basic iSCSI SAN
=
$5,000 for the HDS SMS100 (6 drives, smallest config, single-controller)
- PDF (http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/ds-hitachi-simple-modular-storage-100.pdf)
- WEB (http://www.hds.com/solutions/smb/index.html?WT.ac=HP_SP1_SMB)
- NEWS (http://www.infostor.com/display_article/309056/23/ARTCL/Display/none/Hitachi-ships-entry-level-iSCSI-array/)
$1,000 for nics, switches, cabling, ...
If you go for iSCSI nics with a hardware protocol accelration, cards will be much more but throughput goes up and CPU utilization on the client side won't spike when doing fast transfers.
Dual-controllers would give you redundancy on the storage side (and extra expense), but only if you use an iscsi driver that supports multipathing, or add-on multipathing software (extra expense).
The information presented here about iSCSI SAN is not correct. If you were to go with a FC SAN depending on the number of Servers you have, you would require HBA cards for each Serve and a seperate switch. Where-as iSCSI SAN ties in with your IP LAN. This is were the cost savings begin. Also, iSCSI can perform at the same speed as FC SAN depending on your current hardware infrastructure.
Bearing in mind that the question was asked 23/11/07 what would you have suggested JBond2010?
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