[AusNOG] 10gbit iSCSI SAN's which support active sync across multiply enclosures

[Aaron Weller]

Hi James,

 

As others have recommended an HP P4000/Lefthand could do the this job quite
well. We have these running in production for close to a year now, and very
happy with them. They don't have all the bells and whistles (tiering,
dedupe, etc) that other SANs have, but they do exactly what you want to do
quite well.

 

I'll assume by SAS you mean 15k, as opposed to nearline SAS and you are
after synchronous replication, as opposed to async as well.  If you need
only async, then you have a lot more options in terms of SANs you can use
and maybe the HP P4000 won't be the most suitable.

 

By default the HP P4000s only come with 4 x 1Gb ports, and you will need an
upgrade kit.  Part number is BQ891A, you will need one per module, and each
upgrade kit gives you a dual port SFP+ 10Gb NIC (so you could do either
fibre of DAC cable with these).

 

In the rackspace constraints you have, I can think of 2 options:

 

Option 1:  Basic setup with no redundancy per site: (2U per site, excluding
switching gear)

.         1 x BQ888A (HP P4500 G2).  This gives you 2 x 2U modules, each
with 12 x 600GB SAS.  By default each module is configured with 2 x RAID 5
arrays, which would give you about 5.5TB usable storage. This can be changed
to RAID 10, giving you around 3TB usable storage.

.         Place one module at each site, as these are just servers with SAN
software running on them this means you don't have controller redundancy at
each site, but across the 2 sites you would have redundancy still.

.         Run network RAID 10 (basically RAID 1 if you have just 2 modules)
on the volumes.

.         I believe you would need to setup a FOM (witness) VM which runs at
a different site to both the SAN modules. This is to avoid split brain
scenarios.

 

Option 2: More Advanced "Multi-site" Setup with redundancy per site: (4U per
site, excluding switching gear)

.         2 x BQ888A (HP P4500 G2).  This gives you 4 x 2U modules, each
with 12 x 600GB SAS.  Available storage would be same as Option 1, but with
more redundancy.

.         Place 2 modules at each site, configure the SAN in multi-site
mode.  This would give you redundancy at each site, as well as site failure
redundancy.

.         Run network RAID 10 on the volumes.

.         I believe you will need an FOM on a different site, not sure if
you need one per site as well.

 

3 year 24/7 support: UU995E (one required per pair of modules: BQ888A)

 

With both the options above you will have the following space used:

Hardware RAID 5 on the modules: 5.5TB usable storage

Hardware RAID 10 on the modules: 3TB usable storage

Network RAID 10: Required, as you won't have enough modules to do any other
network RAID option. The above usage is assuming network RAID 10 on the
volumes.

 

We run our clusters on hardware RAID 5, and network RAID 10 and the
performance is very good (in fact we are using storage much more quickly
than IOPs, which we didn't expect).

 

We've not run either of these setups, however done a lot of investigation
into running a similar setup you are looking at doing.  We know the setup
works however, as when doing upgrades to the SAN on a single site we can
take offline half the modules (odd or even only) in a cluster and it
continues to run without a hitch. 

 

Regards,

Aaron

 

 

 

From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of James Braunegg
Sent: Sunday, 13 May 2012 4:54 PM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net
Cc: Micron21 - Support
Subject: [AusNOG] 10gbit iSCSI SAN's which support active sync across
multiply enclosures

 

Hey all sorry for the slightly off topic question, but I'm after some
recommendations for a new 10gbit iSCSI SAN which supports which support
active sync across multiply enclosures via fibre (So each enclosure can be
stored in different physical locations)

 

I'm looking only for a 2RU to 3RU unit with about 4tb to 10tb of RAID 10 SAS
storage.

 

Needs to support all the standard features ie two controllers / power
supplies per enclosure and have enterprise 24/7 local support and lots of
iSCSI targets etc.

 

Any recommendations (specific models / make ) would be great ! (Happy for a
storage rep to reach to me out off list)

 

Kindest Regards

 

James Braunegg
W:  1300 769 972  |  M:  0488 997 207 |  D:  (03) 9751 7616

E:    <mailto:james.braunegg at micron21.com> james.braunegg at micron21.com  |
ABN:  12 109 977 666   

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