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New SAN solution, thoughts? Sun 7320 w/ ZFS, NetApp or Equal Logic
I'm in the market for a new SAN system and we're presently considering between a Pair of Sun 7320's with ZFS, a pair of Equal Logic PS6010XV or NetApp 3000 series array.
We have a two node vSphere 4.1 cluster with a pair of DB servers running MySQL, primarily a Linux shop.
Anyone have any really good/bad experiences with any of these devices or other advice?
We're leaning towards the ZFS solution but it seems there is no software for VMware or quiescing MySQL or other systems where the NetApp seems to have all of that already available but without the readzilla/writezilla caching.
We have a two node vSphere 4.1 cluster with a pair of DB servers running MySQL, primarily a Linux shop.
Anyone have any really good/bad experiences with any of these devices or other advice?
We're leaning towards the ZFS solution but it seems there is no software for VMware or quiescing MySQL or other systems where the NetApp seems to have all of that already available but without the readzilla/writezilla caching.
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Netapp is suing sun because they say that the stole the technology. It's actually very similar to netapp wafl. I have customers that use it in a VMWAre environment but Its not supported oficially by VMWAre
Here's the link, it's from awhile ago but gives you a bit of info
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html
Not sure who's right or wrong but explains why technology is similar but you can search "wafl vs zfs" to get an idea.
http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html
Not sure who's right or wrong but explains why technology is similar but you can search "wafl vs zfs" to get an idea.
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Actually NetApp lost... http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/
I haven't been following too closely. My point is that the technologies appear to be similar although Netapp has better integration with VMWare, Microsoft, SQL, Exchange, etc..
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Yeah, that seems to be NetApp's primary advantage, the advantage on the Sun side is the write caching. I'm torn on the new SAN decision between those two feature sets. On the one hand I can get 8k write iops and 100k+ read iops with some SSD's through SUN but get no software integration support.
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Write cache is easy. As I said, my writes are < 1 ms using SATA disks. Getting good read IOPS is the hard part. Getting good reads is the hard part. You need huge read cache, read from flash disks, or lots of spindles.
Moving to any new storage appliance is a big venture.
How much space are you looking at using? what kind of throughput is needed?
Take a look at the NetApp 2000 series hardware, it makes great use of SAS disks and pretty much all of NetApp's technologies (Dedup, iSCSI, NFS, FC, etc.).
The 2000 series hardware sadly cannot make use of the PAMS (Performance Acceleration Module) which is also referenced above as Flex Cache.
As for scalability, if you decided to go with the 2000 series hardware and determine it isn't right for you and wanted to step up to the 3200 series, it can be as simple as removing the motherboard from the 2000 series chassis and inserting an ESH4 or SAS module in the chassis and turning it into a shelf, enabling you to scale out successfully from there.
Just a few thoughts.
How much space are you looking at using? what kind of throughput is needed?
Take a look at the NetApp 2000 series hardware, it makes great use of SAS disks and pretty much all of NetApp's technologies (Dedup, iSCSI, NFS, FC, etc.).
The 2000 series hardware sadly cannot make use of the PAMS (Performance Acceleration Module) which is also referenced above as Flex Cache.
As for scalability, if you decided to go with the 2000 series hardware and determine it isn't right for you and wanted to step up to the 3200 series, it can be as simple as removing the motherboard from the 2000 series chassis and inserting an ESH4 or SAS module in the chassis and turning it into a shelf, enabling you to scale out successfully from there.
Just a few thoughts.
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We've moved past the NetApp solution because it has no write cache capabilities, we're primarily looking at the Sun 7320 now with read/write caching as well as an EMC Celerra solution with FAST Cache.
The ZFS solution set is fantastic, on the windows side there are VSS aware drivers. This solution can be obtained from SUN directly or Nexenta (on the lower cost side) both are ZFS and have write and read caching.
On the linux side I have little more to offer than the sync command.
I know redhat is working on this issue for kvm. If you're a linux shop I would think this would certainly be on your radar:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fevents.linuxfoundation.org%2Fslides%2F2011%2Flinuxcon-japan%2Flcj2011_sorensen.pdf&ei=Ich-ULLKJYz6rAHMqYCoBg&usg=AFQjCNHgvX5gUmO2kXaSEJYn-Jmu_zD2CA&sig2=uYxS6imnGAvDeiTLeQ5x-w
As would ZFS on linux (NO WRITE CACHING at the moment)
BK
On the linux side I have little more to offer than the sync command.
I know redhat is working on this issue for kvm. If you're a linux shop I would think this would certainly be on your radar:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fevents.linuxfoundation.org%2Fslides%2F2011%2Flinuxcon-japan%2Flcj2011_sorensen.pdf&ei=Ich-ULLKJYz6rAHMqYCoBg&usg=AFQjCNHgvX5gUmO2kXaSEJYn-Jmu_zD2CA&sig2=uYxS6imnGAvDeiTLeQ5x-w
As would ZFS on linux (NO WRITE CACHING at the moment)
BK
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