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Which storage systems would allow at least 10 2gbs fibre ports and have
zoning inside the storage system to mask logical volumes from all but their
appropriate target hosts?
QUESTION:I am trying to find a short list of good storage systems that are suitable
for use as shared storage over a SAN for up to 30 servers. I'm budget
driven on this and need to stay under $110K.
One of the key frustrations in reviewing the mid-tier offerings is that the
vendors' data sheets give very poor guidance about which of their product
lines are well suited for such a large number of servers. I know many of
these systems have only a few fibre ports on them, thus bottlenecking on the
disk I/O interfaces. The high end products like Symmetrix and HDS
Lightning have plenty of fibre ports, but software licensing costs alone
exhaust my entire budget.
In looking at options like LSI Logic E4400, I see multiple fibre ports as an
option, but I have no idea whether this could really scale to 30 servers all
accessing the storage simultaneously.
Which storage systems would allow at least 10 2gbs fibre ports and have
zoning inside the storage system to mask logical volumes from all but their
appropriate target hosts?
ANSWER: Q: I am trying to find a short list of good storage systems that are
suitable for use as shared storage over a SAN for up to 30 servers.
I'm budget driven on this and need to stay under $110K.
A: To be honest, I'm not sure that's a budget that you can meet, but it's hard
to say without knowing more about capacity and performance requirements. I
realize you probably don't have detailed performance requirements, but it
might help everybody if we knew the applications involved. For example is
that 30 servers all running large OLTP databases with thousands of I/O
queries/sec or something much less demanding or something in between. Also,
the amount of storage is going to be critical in determining whether the
budget is realistic, for example if you are looking at an average of say
200GB/server then that's 6TB minimum (without RAID overhead) and it's
extremely unlikely that you'll get anywhere close to 110K, just the FC hsot
bus adapters are likely to swallow 20-30K (assuming no dual paths from any
of the servers) then you'll need a switch, probably 48 port (at least
one/server and also the ports for the array, so more than 32-ports which is
the next size down) which will take another big chunk of the budget.
Q: One of the key frustrations in reviewing the mid-tier offerings is
that the vendors' data sheets give very poor guidance about which of
their product lines are well suited for such a large number of
servers.
A: The problem is, that it's a "how long is a piece of string" question, in
order for any vendor to give you a meaningful answer you need to give them
some idea of what those thirty servers will actually be doing.
Q: I know many of these systems have only a few fibre ports
on them, thus bottlenecking on the disk I/O interfaces. The high
end products like Symmetrix and HDS Lightning have plenty of fibre
ports, but software licensing costs alone exhaust my entire budget.
In looking at options like LSI Logic E4400, I see multiple fibre
ports as an option, but I have no idea whether this could really
scale to 30 servers all accessing the storage simultaneously.
A: And neither do we based on the information supplied ;-) My bet is that 30
servers on a midrange box is probably at the hi-end of expectations, but
it's impossible to really say.
Q: Which storage systems would allow at least 10 2gbs fibre ports and
have zoning inside the storage system to mask logical volumes from
all but their appropriate target hosts?
A: As you've already discovered, most of the mid-range boxes simply don't
support that many ports, and that should be an indication that they really
aren't sized for 30 servers, unless those servers are relatively light
loads.
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