Storage array recommendation needed (midrange, multiprotocol)
As someone who has never deployed a storage array, I am trying to make a smart first purchase.
We are looking to buy a multiprotocol midrange solution that allows us to provide centralized storage for several Oracle and SQL Server databases, and for file storage.
We are currently looking at the EMC NS20 / Dell AX5-4 and the NetApp FAS2000 series.
I would love advice from storage experts and data center ops people who have experience managing these kinds of solutions.
Any vendor has a clear lead? Which solution is easier to manage? Once you've made your purchase, what do you use the vendor for?
Answers (13)
Adam M
Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
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If you are looking for a huge array, look at the big vendors like HP, EMC or Sun/StorageTek. Personally, I wouldn't trust my valuable data to disposable Dell storage. If you want something more scalable on the small to mid range you should definitely consider NetApp. NetApps are great because they are so modular, easily deployable, and easy to use. I have very rarely had any issues with NetApp. They support Unix/Linux with NFS and Windows with SMB. The backup snapshots are great and efficient and if you are replicating the data SnapMirror is also very good. I would emphasize that this is an area where you don't want to skimp. If you go with a product just because it is cheaper you will most likely regret it.
Having been on the "inside" in the storage industry, I had a view into the hardware quality and Adam's right on in that department.
Jacques R
Principal & CEO, The Scotcrest Group, Inc
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The DELL AX series arrays are actually manufactured by EMC and are identical in every respect to their EMC counterparts except for the logos.
The AX series are easy to manage and I have found that the DELL support community forums are actually better than EMC, maybe because the DELL community overall is larger.
Yeah I've worked on NetApp, EMC and various other players in the market. Sometimes differentiators between vendors are the software features. Infoworld recently released the winner of the 2008 Technology of the Year Awards. It mentioned Netapp as well as the other players from Sun & Compellent. Between EMC & Netapp, Netapp is alot easier to manage. Netapp even have SnapManagers for both SQL & Oracle. Since you are running Oracle, you definitely should look at Pillar Data funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. I'm currently evaluating Pillar Data with other vendors. My recommendation would be to evaluate Pillar Data and NetApp and quote out for both. Definitely look at the feature set for both.
Players to look at:
NetApp
Pillar Data (heavy invested by Oracle CEO Ellison)
Links:
I'm quite agree with Luis opinion ... Pillar is a nice solution.
If your needs are exclusivly NAS, Netapp is a right way too.
But with big vendors of storage solutions like EMC, HDS & Dell, provide adapted solutions for most common needs.
If you haven't yet looked at Compellent, you are missing one vendor that is doing things with data storage that none of the other vendors mentioned are doing... it's well worth considering.
I've had very successful deployments ranging from small, iSCSI, single controller, SATA only arrays up to enterprise-grade FC fabric with capacities in excess of 50TB on multiple storage tiers.
Compellent had a harder time competing against the "big name" vendors early on, but now that they're a public company, it makes the due-diligence process much easier.
Their product takes a lot of the management tasks that tie up time on the array and automates a significant portion of it. I've never come across another storage vendor with as much flexibility, scalability, ease of use, and level of functionality as Compellent.
Feel free to reach out to me through LinkedIn if you have questions.
Links:
Peter M
Industry Consultant (on 4/16 AXS-One announced that it will be acquired by Unify Corp. (NASDAQ: UNFY)
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Sam,
Good answers so far, to add to the mix. What I see most often with NetApp's is deployments in CIFS (Windows) environments vs. multi-protocol CIFS/NFS. All of the software tools with NetApp that have already been mentioned are well vetted and work well.
Another area to consider in your evaluations is each vendor’s most recent roadmaps for other areas such as “de-duplication”, which will go along way in reducing your storage foot-print and costs. In this area EMC has Avamar which is still de-dupe for backups only, find out what their long-term strategy is for extending Avamar to file systems and applications. NetApp has ASIS which is already extended for unstructured data, etc. For any storage vendor that you look at I would strongly recommend taking a look at what they are offering and where they are going with “de-duplication”. You always have other vendors to add into the mix such as DataDomain for delivering that technology, but it should definitely be part of your evaluation criteria.
Other considerations, what is your n-tiered storage infrastructure look like, does it or will it include tape? If it does, then you should include Sun Microsystems (they bought STK). They have done quite a lot of work “across the board” on their complete storage products lines. They have a complete line of NAS, SATA, FC and a unique part of their offering is the integration of “Storage Access Manager”, which will enable a seamless n-tiered solution from disk all the way to tape for your file-systems, lots of flexibility and pricing options in their Content Information System (CIS) and Thumper - both currently have aggressive market pricing.
The mid-tier vendors that I like and you may want to include in your evaluation is Nexsan http://www.nexsan.com/, they have good software management options, and have a product called SataBeast, which is really a beast, dense delivery of 42Tb in 4U.
Also, Rackable Systems http://www.rackablesystems.com/products/storage.aspx?nid=storage, and Verari (http://www.verari.com/storage.asp). Both have been leading the charge on HPC, especially Rackable with their acquisition of Terascale.
Note, your storage software management is as important if not more so important that your spinning disks. Be sure to review each vendors management tools, a heterogeneous vs. a homogeneous environment will make a big difference in the software tools also anticipate the need for advanced file system support (i.e. support for global name spaces, Sun ZFS file system for example). Also, look for specific software management support for your most important applications such as Oracle for example; this can be a major difference between vendors to tip the scales. For example, who is offering Oracle specific disk optimization support in the storage management tools to help provision Oracle on specific disk zones inner/outer for optimization? Also, NetApp has a
separate database practice within their storage groups for example, if I’m a big Oracle shop this might be material to add to the evaluation. Ultimately, your biggest cost for storage management is contained in the administration of multiple pieces of software so this area needs as much attention as the disk, power, density, etc.
Good Luck,
Peter
Links:
Clarification added April 8, 2008:
Sam,
Timing is everything. One of the companies I mentioned above (Verari) just announced a new Blade based iSCSI NAS storage solution, see PR
http://www.verari.com/SB5165XL.asp and a snipet from the release:
Storage Networking World (SNW), Orlando, Fla., April 7, 2008 --Verari Systems®, the premier developer of energy efficient data center and desktop consolidation platforms utilizing independent blade-based compute and storage solutions, today announced the industry’s first blade-based high capacity storage appliance. The SB5165XL StorageServer™ combines unified NAS and iSCSI SAN storage networking functionality and a comprehensive feature-set with appliance-like manageability.
“With the SB5165XL StorageServer NAS/iSCSI appliance, Verari’s Storage Group is demonstrating its commitment to continuous innovation and providing customers with an alternative to existing NAS solutions,” said Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW. “Verari is delivering industry-leading capacity and energy efficiency with the added benefit of investment protection by delivering new types of solutions for its BladeRack 2 X-Series platforms.”
Definitely worth a look.
Good Luck,
Peter
http://www.csi1000.com
DataCore's solution is the fastest and most flexible storage solution on the market. DataCore is a storage virtualization platform that runs on a commodity based server platform (of your choosing) and allows you to serve up heterogeneous raw disk from anywhere to your application servers. Not only could you take every raw disk storage platform from every vendor, put it behind DataCore and serve it up as a unified volume, with DataCore you have the ability to perform thin provisioning. Thin provisioning essentially eliminates the dreaded "white-space" issue typically experienced with traditional storage. DataCore will use disk from any direct-attach (DAS), FC or iSCSI array and serve those volumes up to your application servers over FC or iSCSI, or both. Bottom line: you will achieve 90%+ storage utilization, you will accelerate your disk infrastructure, achieve true centralized High Availability, and you will have total control over your environment... without breaking your IT budget.
Links:
Carlo G
DataBase Administrator at Brembo S.p.A.
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A short, clear answer is: EMC changed my life :)
rock solid, full range of features, quality support. The only thing is that it's a little bit expensive, but this will pay out in a little bit. I'm waiting to see new products involving storage and virtualization platforms alltogether
Bye!
Michael P
CTO and Partner, Digital Edge
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Work with a few EMC Celeras. It can publish fiber for SAN and be at the same thing iSCSI interface and has data movers to provide CIFS and NFS. So even without full SAN implementation you can use it for SQL clustering, Oracle RAC and file storage.
If you just go with Clarion you would have to implement SAN and then use your servers for file sharring.
We also used a few HP SAN systems but like EMC better.
From personal experience Oracle works fine over NFS but SQL will have problems working with CIFS. You can still get SQL to work over CIFS but simplest way to configure iSCSI and build full cluster.
So I would do Oracle RAC over NFS (NetApp was the only certified solution by ordacle but now the game is changed). I would do SQL cluster using iSCIS and use Celera data movers to implement NAS. I would not recomend going with pure NAS solutions. And I am big fan of iSCSI.
Certainly performance considerations will apply. consider measuring IOPs against your throughput needs. If you have a lot of small read/writes fiber may not be the best solution. Save money and get more disks.
Out of three EMC,Dell(another EMC), and Netapp.. Netapp will be best way to go for SAN and NAS. If performance is not big requirement then iSCSI will be good to look at as well. Here are few things to watch out for when looking at Netapp.
1. Are you looking at HA then you will need to consider cluster head which will cause you little bit of issue where you have to buy license for both head when total capacity is same as single head. Every protocol you buy will be over head which you have to think about like NFS,CIFS,iSCSI,FCP, then replication like snapmirror and snapvault also snapshot as well.
2. Please think about usable space. Both head need to have own disk at least 3 disk per head on Raid DP for Dataontap. There will be also raid dp over head and spare which comes out to be 3 disk per head. WAFL over head is 10% and snapshot on volume and aggreate are about 25% which can be change.
3. Are you going to out grow, need to plan on see what will be upgrade cost will be from FAS2000 to FAS3000.
Netapp is great box for multi purpose SAN and NAS also great tools like snap manager for exchange,oracle, and sql soon to be VI for Vmware.
There replication tool snapmirror and backup tool snapvault is best replication tool out in the market.
Netapp offer dedupe is free and you could save alot of space in your user home directories and vmware as netapp is only primary storage vendor to offer dedupe in primary storage.
Flexclone is also one of the best tool from netapp and it could clone just about anything in seconds with not much over head.
There are too much to talk about. Also Operations manager will be good tool to monitor as well.
I hope this covers some of your question. Netapp is no doubt will be good fit for your environment.
I would love to answer in more detail just ping me!
Take a look at Xiotech, i recently worked for a reseller installing Equallogic, LeftHand, and a couple of the other big vendors names mentioned in this thread. Had a chance to install most of them, move data on to them, then tune them after install. All have strengths and weaknesses. Xiotech has one of the most straight forward interfaces I have ever seen, the server view
uses the SOA Web Services MS MMC snap ins which allows you to create
a lun, provision to the server and format all on one screen. if you are using ir plan to sue VMware thjey are the only one I know of that does somehting called Virtual view with VMware that is similar, everyhting is done on one
screen and it gives the best view of your virtual environment. Huge product announcement today at SNW Storage Networking Wolrd, you might want to check out the Xiotech Web site.
I did find a quite good solutions listed out here. But based on your availability requirements and affordability I suggest some of the following.
My recommendation would be to evaluate a solution which can virtualize any disks/box behind it. This way it can help you scale at a relatively low cost, rather than going in for a vendor lock solution.
Said that I have seen IBM SANVC a good virutalization solution from my lab observations.
Also from path availability perspective if you are not looking for highly available solution, then you can go in for Active/Passive multipathing solution which might be cost effective (CLARiiON, DS4000 series, NetAPP, HP MSA).
And these boxes can be virtualized using IBM SVC or any storage virtulization solution with a wide back-end array compatability list.
From multi protocol perspective the latest DS4000 series can support iSCSI, FC, SAS connectivity and FC/SATA/SAS disks.
If you prefer to be single vendor solution and you want to scale as you grow I would recommend going with some Thin Provisioning model (3PAR, EMC, IBM SVC - not a Thin Provisioning box per se but it can virtualize)
Thanks,
Ram
