Hardware sizing for iSCSI Storage

Hello,

I know that there are certified hardware partners but I like to discuss hardware sizing generally to get some other points of view:


### Disks
If I plan an DSS7 Active/Passive iSCSI cluster with 8TB or 16TB diskspace, how many disks and what HW-Raid level do you suggest?
8TB: 3 Disks? 4 Disks? RAID5?
16TB: 5 Disks? 6 Disks? ...

### Disk Technology
Is there a big (real world) performance difference between SAS and SATA disk?

### Controller
In the past I used mostly LSI Controllers. Any suggestion here?
Write Cache with BBU yes/no?

### Network
I use MPIO for iSCSI with 2-4 1GBit Ethernet. The next storage I plan to setup with 2x 10Gbit MPIO with an Intel NIC. Ok?

### CPU
Single CPU with 2-4 Cores? How much does Open-E benefit from multicore?

### Memory
If I check the memory usage, Open-E does not use a lot... 8GB memory still enough or better 16 or even more?



Happy discussing... :-)

Best regards, Manuel

I will help start this and leave some room for others to add input.

### Disks
If I plan an DSS7 Active/Passive iSCSI cluster with 8TB or 16TB diskspace, how many disks and what HW-Raid level do you suggest?
8TB: 3 Disks? 4 Disks? RAID5?
16TB: 5 Disks? 6 Disks? ...
-------------------------
Min. of 8 disks as this is best for best IOPS.
-------------------------

### Disk Technology
Is there a big (real world) performance difference between SAS and SATA disk?
-----------------
Yes there is especially with 10K and 15K SAS drives.
-----------------

### Controller
In the past I used mostly LSI Controllers. Any suggestion here?
Write Cache with BBU yes/no?
----------------------------
Yes unless you have a really good UPS.
----------------------------
### Network
I use MPIO for iSCSI with 2-4 1GBit Ethernet. The next storage I plan to setup with 2x 10Gbit MPIO with an Intel NIC. Ok?
------------------------------
All good, bonds are for NAS and MPIO for SANs.
------------------------------
### CPU
Single CPU with 2-4 Cores? How much does Open-E benefit from multicore?
-------------------------------
Quad core or more is good.
-------------------------------
### Memory
If I check the memory usage, Open-E does not use a lot... 8GB memory still enough or better 16 or even more?
---------------------
8GB is enough for 16TB
---------------------

If would help to know for what the storage will be used for. What kind of loads do you expect?

Any Raid/Storage solution setup depends highly on the purpose for which is it intended.