Grant,
I mean to say that often times external SCSI solutions (direct attached)
are cheaper and perform better (in terms of I/O) than iSCSI SANs.
Especially if you're using many disks. SANs are generally chosen for
the ability to be split into LUNs for different servers. Think of it as
a disk which you can partition and serve out to servers on a
per-partition basis, over Ethernet. That's essentially what an iSCSI
SAN does. While DAS systems allow the same sort of configuration, they
don't serve out over Ethernet, only SCSI/SAS.
Since you plan to use NFS to share the files to the other servers, I
think it may make more sense for you to use a SCSI solution if yo don't
need the versatility of a SAN.
Of course I know nothing of how you plan to expand this system, but from
what I understand, with Dell DAS hardware it is possible to connect up
to 4 different servers to the DAS and expand to up to 6 15 disk
enclosures. The MD3000i (iSCSI) expands only to 3.
Another issue is that without compiling in special versions of the iSCSI
initiator, even in 8.0-BETA2 (which is not production-ready), iSCSI
performance and reliability are terrible. There are other versions of
the code (which I currently use) for the iscsi_initiator kernel module,
but unless you're comfortable doing that, you may consider DAS in terms
of ease of implementation and maintenance as well.
Chris
Grant Peel wrote:
Chris,
I don't know what a direct attached array is.....
What I was just thinking was move all of the servers /home directory
to a huge NFS mount.
If you have the time to elaborate fursther, I would apprciate it...
This iSCSI think has me entrigued, but I must admit I know little
about it at this point.
-Grant
----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher J. Umina"
<[email protected]>
To: "Grant Peel" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 11:27 PM
Subject: Re: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
Grant,
I have to ask, is there a reason you're intent on going with a SAN
versus a direct-attached array?
Chris
Grant Peel wrote:
Thanks for the reply.
I have not used/investigated the iSCSI thing yet....
The original question is can I just use an NFS mount to the
storage's /home partition?
-Grant
----- Original Message ----- From: mojo fms To: Grant Peel Cc:
[email protected] Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 4:21 PM
Subject: Re: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
You would be better off at least having the SAN on 1gb ethernet or
even better tripple 1gb (on a 100mb switch should be fine but you
need failover for higher avaliability) ethernet for latency and
failover reasons with a hot backup on the network controller. I
dont see why you could not do this, its just iscsi connection
normally so there is not a big issue getting freebsd to connect to
it. We run 2 of the 16tb powervault which does pretty well for
storage, one runs everything and the other is a replicated offsite
backup. Performance wise, it really depends on how many servers you
have pulling data from the SAN and how hard the IO works on the
current servers. If you have 100 servers you might push the IO a
bit but but it should be fine if your not serving more than 2Mb/s
out to everyone, the servers and disks are going to cache a fair
amount of always used data.
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Grant Peel <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming by the lack of response, my question to too long
winded, let me re-phrase:
What kind of performance might I expect if I load FreeBSD 7.2 on
a 24 disk, Dell PowerVault when its only mission is to serve as a
local area storage unit (/home). Obviously, to store all users /home
data. Throug an NFS connection via fast (100m/b) ethernet. Each
connecting server (6) contain about 200 domains?
-Grant
----- Original Message ----- From: "Grant Peel"
<[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 10:35 AM
Subject: NFS- SAN - FreeBSD
Hi all,
Up to this point, all of our servers are standalone, i.e. all
services and software required are installed on each local server.
Apache, Exim, vm-pop3d, Mysql, etc etc.
Each local server is connected to the Inet via a VLAN (WAN),
to our colo's switch.
Each server contains about 300 domains, each domain has its
own IP.
Each sever is also connected to a VLAN (LAN) via the same
(Dell 48 Port managed switch).
We have been considering consolidating all users data from
each server to a central (local), storage unit.
While I do have active nfs's running (for backups etc), on the
LAN only, I have never attempted to create 1 mass storage unit.
So I suppose the questions are:
1) Is there any specific hardware that anyone might
reccommend? I want to stick with FreeBSD as the OS as I am quite
comfortable admining it,
2) Would anyone reccomend NOT using FreeBSD? Why?
3) Assuming I am using FreeBSD as the storage systems OS,
could NFS simply be used?
4) Considering out whole Inet traffic runs about 2 Mb/s, is
there any reason the port to the Storage unit should be more than
100 M/b (would it be imparative to use 1 G/b transfer)?
TIA,
-Grant
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