$10K iSCSI SAN for production environment (dedicated device or Software SAN)?

[pacmantravis]

We're looking into getting a new iSCSI SAN for our production website which will be hosted on esxi 4. Currently the setup consists of 2 physical servers (a dedicated IIS server and a dedicated SQL server for the website). The site is a CRM site that we provide to our clients and it has approximately 150-300 users on it at any given time. As of now the two servers are set up in basic RAID 1 arrays (146GB 15k x 2).

We're virtualising them to increase availability, scalability and hopefully performance. We're pretty familiar with esxi as that is what we are running in our "in-house" environment. We currently have 12 VM's running on 3 hosts (DRS, vMotion and HA enabled) which are stored on a Thecus NS8800. Surpisingly enough, the Thecus is actually doing very well and the iscsi performance has been very nice. However, we know that the Thecus is not a production system, so we would like to add another SAN to the setup for our more mission critical stuff.

Our biggest priorities in the new SAN are: Performance (for SQL), redundancy, and reliability.

We've been looking at the Dell MD3000i, IBM DS3300, Sun 2510 and others. It seems like when these are fully configured they are just right at or just above our budget. Also, I know that Dell and IBM firmware lock their devices to only only their hard drives, does anyone know if SUN or other mfr's do the same? Also, does anyone have any suggestions on what other SAN's I should be looking at? How do the iStor iS512 and the Jetstor 516iS compare?

Since we don't see ourselves needing TB's and TB's of data in the near future, another route we've been thinking about is getting a used PowerEdge 2900, filling it up with disks and nics and using a software like Falconstor, Datacore Sanmelody or starwind 5.0. However, a BIG issue with that is that unless I am mistaken, all of those programs sit on TOP of Windows which means that we have to deal with update reboots, etc.

Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[pacmantravis]

Does anyone know if Nexentastor and/or SUN 7110 do replication to unlike devices? For example, can it replicate to an NFS share or an ISCSI target that it can connect to? Or must it be to its own software?

[current99]

If you attach an ISCSI target to Nexenta then the storage on that target is just treated

like local storage, so you can make it a ZFS volume and all the replication functoins work

as if it were local storage, but this would not be wan replication you still need a fast link

to the ISCSI target.

Nexenta also supports rsync so it should be able to replicate to a linux box with rsync, but it

may not be as easy to setup as nexenta to nexenta replication.

I don't use nexenta but I have been keeping an eye on there development over the

last year features are comming along at a grate pace.

Where I worked used EMC and Netapp, but I would like to set it up one day for a test/development

cluster.

It depends how much work and time you are willing to give to making it work for you,

Pogo may be better than installing on your HW as the HW is fussy as to what is supported.

Alan

[smaat]

In the process of installing an MD3000i. Had a chance to run IOMeter under various configs. Posted results in the following thread:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1419281#1419281

[HughBorg707]

I am using a DataCore SanMelody in my test network as the core SAN that all my ESX servers look to. It is running on top of 2008 Server and uses SATA discs. At the moment I'm not RAIDing them, just treating each disc as an independent datastore because with only 6 drives I wanted to segment the storage rigidly between different ESX setups.

That said I haven't used all the advanced features of the product but much like running any kind of product on top of windows you have to support that layer of the system as well.

I've also worked with OpenFiler but as simple as some things are its just annoyingly difficult to get other simple things to work (compared to other SAN implementations I've seen)

Once my ESX servers are running, I use the HP Lefthand SAN demo to provide a SAN for the VMs themselves.

Regards

[current99]

One thing I would not do is use anything that is not on the Storage HCL for production use, This is where

some S/W only products have an issue because Vmware will only certify storage HW. That is why you will

only see products like Datacore / Open-e only certified on specific motherboards. But at least they are on the HCL

Nexenta still has to submitt to the HCL, But it is ZFS so you could argue that if the Sun Storage is on the HCL then

in theory I should be ok.

Alan

[TimPhillips]

I`m working with StarWind for a long enought time, and I have only positive experience. Now I already upgraded to StarWind 5, and migrating my storages to HA one. Also, AFAIK StarWind now is passing tests to get in to HCL.

Need to note that Datacore as StarWind is Windows-based product, while open-e on linux kernel. My advice to you - take a closer look to StarWind. I`ve worked with almost all software iSCSI software, and StarWInd is the best for now.