wii_injury
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Suggestions for Tier 1 Storage
Hi guys,
I currently have a "decent" (notice the quotes) infrastructure as my NAS at work, but have been tasked with looking up solutions for a Tier 1, VERY ROBUST, solution for a new SAN.
We started off with an IBM box with a 3ware RAID controller running on iSCSI LUNs. It worked OKAY for a little while, but was never meant to extend as a FILESTORE (it was originally commissioned as an intermediate backup solution).
I am not against FIBRE, but currently have the iSCSI working okay, and if not required, would stay with that to get away from the cost of fibre.
Also, I am a big fan of SUN and love ZFS, so if you guys know of a good solution (that is VERY robust) using SUN, I'd love to hear it.
I currently have a "decent" (notice the quotes) infrastructure as my NAS at work, but have been tasked with looking up solutions for a Tier 1, VERY ROBUST, solution for a new SAN.
We started off with an IBM box with a 3ware RAID controller running on iSCSI LUNs. It worked OKAY for a little while, but was never meant to extend as a FILESTORE (it was originally commissioned as an intermediate backup solution).
I am not against FIBRE, but currently have the iSCSI working okay, and if not required, would stay with that to get away from the cost of fibre.
Also, I am a big fan of SUN and love ZFS, so if you guys know of a good solution (that is VERY robust) using SUN, I'd love to hear it.
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@giltjr
I disagree.
1. With etherchannel we can aggregate up to 8 1GB nics
2. 10GB nics are way cheapter than fibre
3. Netapp did a study with vwmare and the difference was under 10% for iscsi, FC, and NFS for storage.
For the cost of fibre cards, switch, etc.. I would get more spindles but it all depends on the environment. Unless you're doing a lot of transaction intensive processing you're not going to see a really large benefit of FC over iSCSI. I've done both on Netapp, HP, etc.. and in most cases you don't go over 1GB
I disagree.
1. With etherchannel we can aggregate up to 8 1GB nics
2. 10GB nics are way cheapter than fibre
3. Netapp did a study with vwmare and the difference was under 10% for iscsi, FC, and NFS for storage.
For the cost of fibre cards, switch, etc.. I would get more spindles but it all depends on the environment. Unless you're doing a lot of transaction intensive processing you're not going to see a really large benefit of FC over iSCSI. I've done both on Netapp, HP, etc.. and in most cases you don't go over 1GB
Must have missed paulsovol, comments.
1) This gives you more bandwidth in a way, but not really. With etherchannel all traffic between the same MAC addresses must traverse a single physical link. So depending on where the etherchannel is setup, you still may be limited to 125MB/s of I/O througput.
2) I would have to look at the total cost of of all networking related equipment. I'm not sure of the total cost between 10 Gbe vs. say 4 or 8 Gb FC. If you already have 10 Gbe, then it should be a no brainer.
3) For some environments you will not see a big benefit of FC over iSCSI, for others you will. As you say, it depends on your transaction rates and what your SAN can do.
In our environment we do all of the heavy I/O on IBM mainframes. Although currently we only have 4Gb FICON, we have 6 of them. Because of the way I/O works on the mainframe and in z/OS any I/O request to any disk volume can go over any of the 6 paths. In fact the response does not need to come back on the same physical path as it went out on.
The other issue you have with iSCSI is not a technical issue, but a people issue. In some places the networking group does not do anything with the FC setup. The "DASD/SAN" people handle that. When you go iSCSI (or even FCoE) now all of sudden you move some of the responsibility from one group to another. This can cause problems.
1) This gives you more bandwidth in a way, but not really. With etherchannel all traffic between the same MAC addresses must traverse a single physical link. So depending on where the etherchannel is setup, you still may be limited to 125MB/s of I/O througput.
2) I would have to look at the total cost of of all networking related equipment. I'm not sure of the total cost between 10 Gbe vs. say 4 or 8 Gb FC. If you already have 10 Gbe, then it should be a no brainer.
3) For some environments you will not see a big benefit of FC over iSCSI, for others you will. As you say, it depends on your transaction rates and what your SAN can do.
In our environment we do all of the heavy I/O on IBM mainframes. Although currently we only have 4Gb FICON, we have 6 of them. Because of the way I/O works on the mainframe and in z/OS any I/O request to any disk volume can go over any of the 6 paths. In fact the response does not need to come back on the same physical path as it went out on.
The other issue you have with iSCSI is not a technical issue, but a people issue. In some places the networking group does not do anything with the FC setup. The "DASD/SAN" people handle that. When you go iSCSI (or even FCoE) now all of sudden you move some of the responsibility from one group to another. This can cause problems.
The biggest issue with iSCSI is that unless you have 10 Gigabit Ethernet, iSCSI is going to limit you in performance to 1 Gbps. Even if you NIC team you still have performance issues.
Where as Fiber Channel you can do 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, or even 20 Gbps.