On 06/04/2010 05:31, Adam Levin wrote: > Great question. The first thing I'm going to ask is whether you've > considered at least VMWare and Oracle on NFS instead of block? Depending > on your requirements, and which vendor you end up going with, you may be > not only surprised how well it works, but very happy that you made the > decision. Personally, I'm a big fan of NFS for VMWare and Oracle, > especially if you have a good network infrastructure (10g helps) and if > you go with a NetApp.
I've thought about Oracle on NFS, but not Oracle. (Our Oracle install is reasonably small and we don't really manage it ourselves. We have two applications that run on top of Oracle. We know enough to keep it running/backed up/etc, but we rely on the application vendors for the most things Oracle related. As a result we'd probably leave Oracle on block since that's the way they deal with it.) Right now our server access layer is via 1G (X6748-GE-TX blades in a Cisco 6500), but that will likely get upgraded in the 12-18 month time frame. At that point we'll likely move to the Nexus 5000 line. As a result I'm making sure we have 10G (iSCSI + NFS) and FCoE upgrade options available. (With NetApp this unfortunately pushes us out of the FAS2000 line which otherwise does everything we'd like but has no upgrade options.) > While I'm a huge fan of Compellent for SAN (really, really cool > product), you should be careful how much CIFS/NFS you plan to do with > it. They're *just* introducing their integrated NAS offering, and it's > based on ZFS. I wouldn't put ZFS in an enterprise datacenter yet -- I > don't trust it enough, and I've heard one too many stories about > unrecoverable filesystem errors (anecdotal, admittedly, and I'm still > trying to get more details before I make any decisions). This isn't to > say you couldn't put a gateway in front of the Compellent for NAS, but > before you do that you should identify how much NAS vs. how much block > you really need. I hadn't thought about ZFS issues. That's something I'll consider. Our plan is to start out at ~10TB usable. That would be about 6-7TB CIFS/NFS to end-users, ~2TB of VMware (including some MS SQL and Exchange that's on top of VMware), and some small other misc bits . The rest would be available for future expansion. > Also, if you go with Exchange 2010, it's a game-changer for storage, > since they've changed the I/O profile significantly from earlier > versions, so it doesn't require nearly the horsepower it used to, but it > does require a lot of space. We are in the midst of an Exchange 2010 upgrade/domain consolidation. (I'm amused by MS telling everyone to use DAS for Exchange 2010 since that doesn't work very well in a virtaul environment.) > There's no question in my mind that NetApp's NAS is about the best in > the industry, but "best" is relative to what your needs are. It's > expensive, but for random access primary storage and data protection for > file service, Oracle and VMWare over NFS, I wouldn't choose anyone else. > The Celerra (NS) products have always played second fiddle. > > However, that assumes that your primary use-case is NAS. NetApp does > block storage, but it's, well, odd. The LUN is a container file inside > of WAFL. You get most of the advanced functionality, but it's a bit > clunkier to deal with things like dedupe, snapshots, etc. It's also a > lot more expensive -- not only is NetApp charging a premium already, but > you've got the WAFL filesystem taking up space, then a LUN container > over it, and then the filesystem that the LUN is formatted in. It's a > lot of overhead before you get to usable space. > > The EMC all-in-one is probably a better choice if you're looking for > more block and a little NAS, since it's just a Clariion block storage > device first and then it'll lay out the Celerra NAS stuff on top of the > Clariion LUNs. If you insist (heh -- loaded word there) on sticking with > block for VMWare, Oracle and even Exchange, then you may be happier with > the all-in-one. > > Of course, if you could possibly swing a Compellent with a NetApp head > for a NAS gateway, you'd get the best of all worlds. :) Sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think we'd be able to do that. (Plus the NetApp V series stuff doesn't appear to support Compellent on the backend.) > Feel free to ask any followups. My company has both a FAS 3000-series > and a Compellent in our lab, and we used to have a Celerra. We do have > an EMC all-in-one in the production datacenter, but it's not being used > much right now and I haven't played with it hands-on. In the interest of > full disclosure, I'll point out that I also used to work for NetApp, but > only for a year. :) > > -Adam I think the biggest question I've got is real-world utilization rates. (i.e. how much raw storage does 10TB of data actually take after accounting for all overhead?) I currently have proposals from both NetApp and Compellent (and expect to have an EMC one shortly) and I'm trying to get as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as I can. I've seen various things online (mostly vendor blogs) and heard statements from resellers, but I'd appreciate hearing from customers what they are seeing in actual installs. -- Thanks Jefferson Cowart [email protected] _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
