Cheap supported iSCSI or FC SAN

[Gabrie1]

Hi

For our company we need a cheap SAN, this can be Fiber channel or iSCSI, but I think FC will be out of the picture because of the extra components needed. I was first thinking of using OpenFiler or other opensource iSCSI filers, but none of them seems to be supported. Any tips? Its for a lab, no performance needed. Okay, a little performance would be nice

[ac57846]

Gabe,

Getting a system certified costs, so open source & free products don't do it.

If it's a lab do you need it to be supported?

Recent releases of OpenFiler are good for ESX, with a decent number of physical dissk and a decent RAID controller it'll fill a gigabit ethernet channel.

My lab has a second hand IBM SAN for storage, if it needs to be supported then start looking at eBay.

Al.

[Gabrie1]

Well, supported because I've heard that OpenFiler sometimes has a problem with ESX.

[oreeh]

Take a look at IET (iSCSI Enterprise Target).

Works well with ESX.

[pauska]

The cheapest FC storage I could find (midrange, not lowend) was Nexsan.

[ac57846]

As oreeh mentions the IET works well with ESX, this is the standard iSCSI target that is used with most Linux based NAS distributions, it's what OpenFiler uses as well as most full Linux distributions. Recent versions are good to work with ESX, early versions weren't good with ESX's locking.

The biggest issue I had with OpenFiler was that, when I used it, all of the iSCSI LUNs were presented as LUN 0 until you manully edited the ietd.conf file.

Another option would be a windows box with Rocket Division's StarWind iSCSI target.

Also remember that if the throughput of iSCSI over gigabit ethernet is sufficient then 1GB fibre channel is slightly faster & definitely avaiilable used for low prices.

[jamieorth]

Define cheap? Do you have a budget? I would look at ebay. We used to have an EMC CX300 that was used in production serving 4 pHosts and 50 vm's with no issues...

Regards...

Jamie

Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...