| Author |
Message |
m0rk
Guest
|
 Posted:
Wed Sep 07, 2005 12:16 am Post subject:
when to nas or san |
|
|
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ? |
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|
 |
Faeandar
Guest
|
| Posted:
Wed Sep 07, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
| Quote: | We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
|
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F |
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| Back to top |
|
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m0rk
Guest
|
| Posted:
Wed Sep 07, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com says...
| Quote: | On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F
|
Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
accounting app.
Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
over the next couple years.
So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
hq for everything ....
What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
adg do we need sort of thing .... |
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|
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victor.engle@gmail.com
Guest
|
| Posted:
Wed Sep 07, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
Faeandar makes an excellent point in the post above regarding the range
of responses you may expect from your post. I don't believe all SAN or
all NAS storage solutions are appropriate unless your requirements are
all block or all file. You mentioned both requirements above so I
believe a SAN/NAS solution would be ideal. I believe both EMC and
Hitachi offer SAN solutions with NAS gateways. Basically the NAS
portion is simply the NAS controllers with SAN storage assigned to them
which they then serve out via CIFS or NFS. A couple of years ago
Hitachi partnered with Netapp to offer a Netapp gateway with Lightning
arrays. Netapp offers an excellent NAS solution and within the last 2
years have been offering SAN connectivity for block i/o requirements.
Strictly from a capacity standpoint a midrange NAS/SAN solution should
work for you. Look at the HDS 9585 or the EMC cx700 for SAN or a Netapp
filer for NAS. If availability is critical and if your budget allows
you may look at the Hitachi Lightning or TagmaStor or the EMC DMX
arrays. The difference is 100% uptime and real scalability. The
Lightning arrays can support more than 1000 disks and provide backend
bandwidth to fully support those drives. The midrange arrays don't
really scale up very well but for 16TB a midrange would work well.
Midrange arrays can't deliver 100% uptime. I've seen both controllers
on midrange arrays lock up or become unstable because of misbehaving FC
disks. Midrange array vendors usually say their arrays offer 99.999%
uptime and that is probably true but once in a while there will be an
outage so it is a simple question of whether that is tolerable in your
environment.
Good luck with your decision and implementation.
Vic |
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Faeandar
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Sep 08, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 08:53:05 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
| Quote: | In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F
Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
accounting app.
Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
over the next couple years.
So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
hq for everything ....
What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
adg do we need sort of thing ....
|
Given the applications you're describing I would say SAN is the way to
go. Everything is host based in the environment you described so
there's no need for sharing in the traditional sense.
SAN's can easily scale to your capacity demands, and depending on your
performance and availability requirements it can be done fairly
inexpensively. Look outside of traditional SAN arrays from people
like HDS, EMC, and IBM. Nexsan, Pillar Data, LSI Logic, DotHill, etc,
can all provide FC based storage bricks that can scale and be fairly
reliable/available, and for alot less money than the big names. It
sounds to me like you could go that route given the huge network point
of failure....
I hear the Qlogic switches are quite good at the workgroup level as
well. Enterprise class switches are still McData and now Cisco.
Brocade's EC switch is something I would stay away from personally but
their workgroup switches are excellent.
Emulex and Qlogic are both good hba vendors.
~F |
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| Back to top |
|
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Spindle
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Sep 08, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
m0rk wrote:
| Quote: | We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
|
Sorry not an answer but a question: Why post a short lived message?
Your question and the answers you'll get could be useful to other
people if you let them hang. Care to explain why? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Andy
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Sep 08, 2005 10:21 pm Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
In article <dqfvh1df5bv1hga6i62qmvh4ed5bomppd0@4ax.com>, mr_castalot@yahoo.com
says...
| Quote: |
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 08:53:05 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F
Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
accounting app.
Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
over the next couple years.
So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
hq for everything ....
What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
adg do we need sort of thing ....
Given the applications you're describing I would say SAN is the way to
go. Everything is host based in the environment you described so
there's no need for sharing in the traditional sense.
SAN's can easily scale to your capacity demands, and depending on your
performance and availability requirements it can be done fairly
inexpensively. Look outside of traditional SAN arrays from people
like HDS, EMC, and IBM. Nexsan, Pillar Data, LSI Logic, DotHill, etc,
can all provide FC based storage bricks that can scale and be fairly
reliable/available, and for alot less money than the big names. It
sounds to me like you could go that route given the huge network point
of failure....
I hear the Qlogic switches are quite good at the workgroup level as
well. Enterprise class switches are still McData and now Cisco.
Brocade's EC switch is something I would stay away from personally but
their workgroup switches are excellent.
Emulex and Qlogic are both good hba vendors.
|
agreed but
the san & nas question is pretty easy
if you want to replace file serving storage functions use NAS
if you want to replace direct access storage/functions use SAN
& while the vendors you mentioned are good ones they are Fibre
Channel related and iSCSI is finally starting to overtake them
in terms of capacity & performance, certainly in price.
_____ . .
' \\ . . |>>
O// . . |
\_\ . . |
| | . . . |
/ | . www.EvenEnterprises.com . . . |
/ .| info@EvenEnterprises.com . . . |
/ . | 310-544-9439 / 310-544-9309 fax . . . o
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Authorized - DIRECT VAR/VAD/Distributor for new mid-high end storage
iSCSI/NAS/SAN/RAID from EMC, HP, Equallogic, Quantum, OverLand Storage |
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m0rk
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Sep 09, 2005 12:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
In article <1126152161.772872.49680@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
arthedge@gmail.com says...
| Quote: |
m0rk wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Sorry not an answer but a question: Why post a short lived message?
Your question and the answers you'll get could be useful to other
people if you let them hang. Care to explain why?
|
Sorry, I dont understand what you mean by a short lived message ... can
you explain? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Bradley K. Sherman
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Sep 09, 2005 2:29 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
Let me save you a lot of aggravation:
If you're not 100% sure you want a SAN, you want a NAS.
--bks |
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|
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Faeandar
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Sep 09, 2005 7:23 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
On Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:21:03 GMT, info@evenenterprises.com (Andy)
wrote:
| Quote: | In article <dqfvh1df5bv1hga6i62qmvh4ed5bomppd0@4ax.com>, mr_castalot@yahoo.com
says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 08:53:05 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F
Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
accounting app.
Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
over the next couple years.
So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
hq for everything ....
What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
adg do we need sort of thing ....
Given the applications you're describing I would say SAN is the way to
go. Everything is host based in the environment you described so
there's no need for sharing in the traditional sense.
SAN's can easily scale to your capacity demands, and depending on your
performance and availability requirements it can be done fairly
inexpensively. Look outside of traditional SAN arrays from people
like HDS, EMC, and IBM. Nexsan, Pillar Data, LSI Logic, DotHill, etc,
can all provide FC based storage bricks that can scale and be fairly
reliable/available, and for alot less money than the big names. It
sounds to me like you could go that route given the huge network point
of failure....
I hear the Qlogic switches are quite good at the workgroup level as
well. Enterprise class switches are still McData and now Cisco.
Brocade's EC switch is something I would stay away from personally but
their workgroup switches are excellent.
Emulex and Qlogic are both good hba vendors.
agreed but
the san & nas question is pretty easy
if you want to replace file serving storage functions use NAS
if you want to replace direct access storage/functions use SAN
|
But what *requires* which is not so easily defined all the time. Take
Oracle for instance. Some would say you have to have block access,
others say NFS rocks. So while block v. file is easy, defining what
you need file for and what you need block for is not always as clear.
| Quote: | & while the vendors you mentioned are good ones they are Fibre
Channel related and iSCSI is finally starting to overtake them
in terms of capacity & performance, certainly in price.
|
I just read that of the US$7.2billion SAN industry iSCSI got US$131mil
of it last year. I don;t see any native iSCSI storage with the
capacity or performance of an FC array. FC array's can reach 160TB
internally, with the capacibilty of virualizing up to 35+PB of
externally attached storage. Good luck with that on native iSCSI.
Now most switch vendors are incorporating iSCSI blades so you can
essentially make FC array's avaialble over iSCSI so the point may be
moot.
In terms of performance, iSCSI is not and cannot compete with FC on
performance. At least not yet.
~F |
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victor.engle@gmail.com
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Sep 09, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
Your post is prepended with this message....
"Note: The author of this message requested that it not be archived.
This message will be removed from Groups in 6 days (Sep 15, 4:56 pm). " |
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|
|
Spindle
Guest
|
| Posted:
Sat Sep 10, 2005 7:58 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
m0rk wrote:
| Quote: | In article <1126152161.772872.49680@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
arthedge@gmail.com says...
m0rk wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Sorry not an answer but a question: Why post a short lived message?
Your question and the answers you'll get could be useful to other
people if you let them hang. Care to explain why?
Sorry, I dont understand what you mean by a short lived message ... can
you explain?
|
I see a note like this looking at your messages:
Note: The author of this message requested that it not be archived.
This message will be removed from Groups in 5 days (Sep 15, 4:56 pm).
Your newsreader client I believe sets a flag instructing the newsgroup
to not archive your messages.
| Quote: | From you reply that flag was not set intentionally. Sorry if I sounded
reproachful before. |
|
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|
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Spindle
Guest
|
| Posted:
Sat Sep 10, 2005 8:16 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
|
|
m0rk wrote:
| Quote: | We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
|
Perhaps posing the question in terms of SAN versus NAS is too
simplistic and frankly passee IMO.
There are so many different flavors of NAS and SAN solutions that the
common acronym seems to be the only thing they have in common.
Abstract capacity is not much of a challenging requirement anymore, and
expandability follows the same fate. You'll agree with me if you
consider that to make 1 GB only takes two drives, so those 16TB could
be served using 2, maybe 3 3U units. Not much of a SAN or of a NAS.
How critical is that data? How fast should be delivered to each
transaction?
Those questions could suggest spanning part of those 16TB on many fast
drives instead, say 15K RPM and 18GB capacity.
Storing 8TB over 18GB disk requires hundreds of volume, 900+ if my math
is correct. Now we have a completely different NAS or SAN problem, and
we have barely scratched the surface.
Is that information stored all in the same location, do we need
mirroring, how granular should be our recovery.. these and many other
questions can push the choice toward different vendors-solutions.
Sorry, I cannot suggest a link where SAN and NAS are compared. It may
no exist, It may not make sense. |
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Faeandar
Guest
|
| Posted:
Sat Sep 10, 2005 4:16 pm Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
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On Fri, 9 Sep 2005 02:29:38 +0000 (UTC), bks@panix.com (Bradley K.
Sherman) wrote:
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Let me save you a lot of aggravation:
If you're not 100% sure you want a SAN, you want a NAS.
--bks
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Not a bad rule of thumb imo. I think I'll store that one away.
Thanks.
~F |
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Andy
Guest
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Mon Sep 12, 2005 6:15 am Post subject:
Re: when to nas or san |
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In article <l5s1i19ce1cdvdbidplta8h541pro86u6a@4ax.com>, mr_castalot@yahoo.com
says...
| Quote: |
On Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:21:03 GMT, info@evenenterprises.com (Andy)
wrote:
In article <dqfvh1df5bv1hga6i62qmvh4ed5bomppd0@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com
says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 08:53:05 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@4ax.com>,
mr_castalot@yahoo.com says...
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@email.ever> wrote:
We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
16TB for the next few years ...
Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
responses as:
1) depends on the application
2) nas for file access, san for block access
3) nas can do it all
4) san can do it all
5) databases must use san's
6) real databases should use nas
7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
complexity. That being said....
The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
vendors, imo.
In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
~F
Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
accounting app.
Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
over the next couple years.
So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
hq for everything ....
What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
adg do we need sort of thing ....
Given the applications you're describing I would say SAN is the way to
go. Everything is host based in the environment you described so
there's no need for sharing in the traditional sense.
SAN's can easily scale to your capacity demands, and depending on your
performance and availability requirements it can be done fairly
inexpensively. Look outside of traditional SAN arrays from people
like HDS, EMC, and IBM. Nexsan, Pillar Data, LSI Logic, DotHill, etc,
can all provide FC based storage bricks that can scale and be fairly
reliable/available, and for alot less money than the big names. It
sounds to me like you could go that route given the huge network point
of failure....
I hear the Qlogic switches are quite good at the workgroup level as
well. Enterprise class switches are still McData and now Cisco.
Brocade's EC switch is something I would stay away from personally but
their workgroup switches are excellent.
Emulex and Qlogic are both good hba vendors.
agreed but
the san & nas question is pretty easy
if you want to replace file serving storage functions use NAS
if you want to replace direct access storage/functions use SAN
But what *requires* which is not so easily defined all the time. Take
Oracle for instance. Some would say you have to have block access,
others say NFS rocks. So while block v. file is easy, defining what
you need file for and what you need block for is not always as clear.
& while the vendors you mentioned are good ones they are Fibre
Channel related and iSCSI is finally starting to overtake them
in terms of capacity & performance, certainly in price.
I just read that of the US$7.2billion SAN industry iSCSI got US$131mil
of it last year. I don;t see any native iSCSI storage with the
capacity or performance of an FC array. FC array's can reach 160TB
internally, with the capacibilty of virualizing up to 35+PB of
externally attached storage. Good luck with that on native iSCSI.
Now most switch vendors are incorporating iSCSI blades so you can
essentially make FC array's avaialble over iSCSI so the point may be
moot.
In terms of performance, iSCSI is not and cannot compete with FC on
performance. At least not yet.
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the new generation of native iSCSI storage that's delivering now has
some interesting concepts AND i think the #s next year will show a
different story of what happened this year since we're selling more
& more of it into mid range requirements
consider this, if every 14 bay iSCSI RAID has 3 Gig-E ports on it &
everytime you add another one to the mix a volume manager adds it to
the existing subsystem, what kind of IOP & transfer rate specs, let
alone capacity, do you think you can get out of an iSCSI subsystem ?
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