Post your HW used for storage..

[tjk]

Folks,

We are looking at using DSS for Xenserver and VMWare for a few customer deployments we having coming up. They will be deployed in replication/HA pairs.

I am looking for feedback on what sort of storage servers everyone here is using? We are looking at 2u/12hdd or 3u/16hdd servers, a SAS raid card so we can have volumes of 15k sas and slower SATA if needed, and 16g of ram. They will be deployed with iSCSI so we are looking at 4 to 6 GE's bonded together plus 2GE's for replication.

We normally use Dell and SuperMicro HW and 3ware 9690sa raid controllers.

What do you have running? Are you happy with the performance? What would you recommend for the best IOPS?

We are looking for 5 to 10tb arrays for deployment.

Thanks for any feedback/ideas you can share!

Regards,
Tom

[enealDC]

I'd recommend the Supermicro SC936EL2 chassis with Areca SAS controllers and the X7DWN+ motherboards.

We have several of this configuration and aside from the drives, we are happy.

[Robotbeat]

The Supermicro stuff is good. I recommend that.

Assuming you need to use the higher capacity (100s of GBs) 15k SAS drives for your current potential setup (12-port), I'd go with a 24-port SATA (Seagate ES2) system instead, since it will have about the same performance as 12 15k drives (perhaps more, since you have twice as much drives which also each have twice as much on-drive cache). Also, go with the Areca 1680ix-24 SAS/SATA controller. Areca controllers are generally less expensive than 3ware or adaptec, plus the 16 and 24 port ones let you put in your own DDR2 stick (though they come default with a ~256MB stick), up to 4GB of cache! So, for the same price as an equivalent 3ware controller, you get a controller with about the same (if not more) base performance plus 4GB of battery-backed cache.

Correct me if I'm wrong (please!), but if you're using autofailover, it's not recommended to use write-back cache on the iSCSI target (this refers system cache, NOT raid card cache), so having 4GB of raid cache vs. 512MB of raid cache really can make a big difference of performance when used in HA environments. Also, the Areca cards support RAID 60, which the 3ware ones don't.

Also, if you don't need 24 TB of storage, it may be possible to short-stroke the SATA drives to get some more performance out of them (anyone have any experience with short-stroking in the open-e environment?).

[SeanLeyne]

We have 2 Intel SSR212MC2 storage chassis (2U w/12 hot-swap HDDs) for the SANs and 2 Intel SR1500 1U servers (2 x Quad CPU) for VMWare ESX.

In the SANs, we have 1 x Intel Quad Gbe Server adapter, the ports are bonded into a single connection which redundancy between the SAN and iSCSI/FTP services to our internal network (via our HP ProCurve switch) and 1 x Intel Dual 10Gbe CX-4 adapter which are direct connected to each of the VMWare servers (which also have Intel Dual 10Gbe CX-4 adapters).

So, in a 6U of rack space, we have a fully redundant VM and SAN configuration with the fastest possible VM-to-SAN connectivity.

[tjk]

We have 2 Intel SSR212MC2 storage chassis (2U w/12 hot-swap HDDs) for the SANs and 2 Intel SR1500 1U servers (2 x Quad CPU) for VMWare ESX.

In the SANs, we have 1 x Intel Quad Gbe Server adapter, the ports are bonded into a single connection which redundancy between the SAN and iSCSI/FTP services to our internal network (via our HP ProCurve switch) and 1 x Intel Dual 10Gbe CX-4 adapter which are direct connected to each of the VMWare servers (which also have Intel Dual 10Gbe CX-4 adapters).

So, in a 6U of rack space, we have a fully redundant VM and SAN configuration with the fastest possible VM-to-SAN connectivity.

SeanLeyne,

What raid card are you using with the Intel 2u storage system? You using SATA or SAS hdd's? How is the performance?

Tom

[SeanLeyne]

What raid card are you using with the Intel 2u storage system? You using SATA or SAS hdd's? How is the performance?

We got Adaptec 5404's, they were the best when we built out the units. I must say that the Areca's with 2 or 4GB cache support are very attractive.

Performance has been good, but we haven't really been pounding on them since VMWare only recently added support for the 10Gbe cards (and have been working out other problems).