It has been a week plus since we spent a lot of money and the question has been raised, what are we doing with that storage? Exactly?
It isn't fancy storage. In fact, it is the cheapest performant storage we could budget for. It's not SATA, but it is 7.2K RPM SAS. And there are 35TB of it. It's a server, with direct attached storage. Not a dedicated storage unit. Not fibre channel. An off the shelf server, a high quality RAID card, a bunch of storage shelves, and a pair of network ports.
A final decision hasn't been made yet for how we're presenting this storage to consumers, but iSCSI of some kind is the 90% likely choice. Whether that's Linux (a.k.a. the free option) or something else (a.k.a. the pay option) remains to be seen. The whole point of this storage is to be cheap per GB.
We're also adding a pair of Fibre Channel Drive enclosures to our EVA4400 to provide true high-speed low-latency service at a much reduced cost versus the EVA6100. Yes FC drives are EOL in a very short while, but the EVA4400 doesn't support SAS (yet). This is where our ESX cluster is likely to expand into when the time comes, that kind of stuff.
And a new tape library. It's an HP StorageWorks MSL4048. It is LTO4, fibre-attached, and has lots of slots. The native capacity of this guy is 37.5TB which is a whole lot larger than the 7.9TB of our current SDLT320 unit. It only has two drives for now which will limit flexibility somewhat, but it is upgradeable to four drives later when the money tree starts producing again. If we really need to, we can stack another MSL4048 on top of it for even more storage. Because it is drive-limited, we kind of have to stage all backups to disk and then copy from disk to tape; we won't be doing any backups directly to tape.
When it'll get here is anyone's guess. Purchasing is currently digging out of an avalanche of last-minute orders just like ours, so they're w-a-y backed up down there.
It isn't fancy storage. In fact, it is the cheapest performant storage we could budget for. It's not SATA, but it is 7.2K RPM SAS. And there are 35TB of it. It's a server, with direct attached storage. Not a dedicated storage unit. Not fibre channel. An off the shelf server, a high quality RAID card, a bunch of storage shelves, and a pair of network ports.
A final decision hasn't been made yet for how we're presenting this storage to consumers, but iSCSI of some kind is the 90% likely choice. Whether that's Linux (a.k.a. the free option) or something else (a.k.a. the pay option) remains to be seen. The whole point of this storage is to be cheap per GB.
We're also adding a pair of Fibre Channel Drive enclosures to our EVA4400 to provide true high-speed low-latency service at a much reduced cost versus the EVA6100. Yes FC drives are EOL in a very short while, but the EVA4400 doesn't support SAS (yet). This is where our ESX cluster is likely to expand into when the time comes, that kind of stuff.
And a new tape library. It's an HP StorageWorks MSL4048. It is LTO4, fibre-attached, and has lots of slots. The native capacity of this guy is 37.5TB which is a whole lot larger than the 7.9TB of our current SDLT320 unit. It only has two drives for now which will limit flexibility somewhat, but it is upgradeable to four drives later when the money tree starts producing again. If we really need to, we can stack another MSL4048 on top of it for even more storage. Because it is drive-limited, we kind of have to stage all backups to disk and then copy from disk to tape; we won't be doing any backups directly to tape.
When it'll get here is anyone's guess. Purchasing is currently digging out of an avalanche of last-minute orders just like ours, so they're w-a-y backed up down there.
Quote: "Whether that's Linux (a.k.a. the free option)..."
Have you looked at the OpenFiler product?
That is definitely on The List to check out. We're up to our eyeballs in another project right now so haven't had the time to do the in depth research needed. Since this storage project is being pushed by the dyed-in-the-wool Windows guy, that just might be a hard sell. Won't know until I start building the side-by-side feature comparisons.