Dell Quote... good price?
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Hi Folks,
KMM/KVM, this is in rack management. One of the requirements I gave Dell is to have a 1U fold out monitor with keyboard and pad which can connect to the 4 servers for on site management. (Just fold out the in rack 1U unit. Seen loads of these and been very useful in the past. I have already queried with them why I need both KMM & KVM. Will see what they say. Perhaps they KVM is for the servers to connect to and then the KVM connect to the 1U KMM unit. Will see. Together on the quote these only came to about £1,500. So very small compared to the entire bill. iDRAC is useful for us for remote management. The KMM is in addition for easy on site (no need to carry anything) management.
I am interested in R6 or R5 now. Generally, I've done R5 on smaller SSD arrays but not 16 x 800 GB. I just assumed at that size R5 would be quite risky like if spinning disk, that risk is ok for us on the dev hosts but not stable enough for production - or so I thought. Hence Raid 10. But if raid 5 or 6 are considered solid, then I will rethink that... my question. Lets go based on Raid 6. We still easily hit out IO needs and obviously hit our space requirements:
- We plan to use Mix Use SSDs as r/w for us is about 45%/55%. If we use R6, don't we get additional write penalties for parity over R10 which would need a change to write intensive disks? Could be way off on that so advise would be helpful.
@MattSpeller Yep, this in R10 will be amazing, but Raid 5/6 will easily perform how we need. The R10 decision was more to help protect customers by putting as much space as possible between potential disk failures and having to bring service down to restore. In reality, R6 with VM replica to other host is looking good and meets our needs.
@scottalanmiller Yes, I fully understand re the price, but as a rough guide as to if its a reasonable quote. I've not purchased a Porsche before. If I were told its going to cost me £700k by a dealer and 'its a great deal'... i'd only know by checking what others paid and online rather than the 'list price'. As said, I have spent most time using them, not buying... so a rough guide that the cost is pretty decent would be helpful
But understandable if nobody is from the UK/London to say -
@Jimmy9008 For the pull out 1U KMM/KVM - make sure you have lots of room behind you / in the isle to pull it out. We have one and it always hits me square in the nuts when I pull it out.
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@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 For the pull out 1U KMM/KVM - make sure you have lots of room behind you / in the isle to pull it out. We have one and it always hits me square in the nuts when I pull it out.
Oh wait, I mean... that sucks.......... -
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
KMM/KVM, this is in rack management.
Isn't that what your iDrac is for? What's the use of a KVM with an enterprise server?
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Yes, R6 will be far safer than R5 here. If two SSDs died around the same time, your R5 would be dead.
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@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
Yes, R6 will be far safer than R5 here. If two SSDs died around the same time, your R5 would be dead.
Yes, I get that re r5/r6 and why r6 is safer.
Would raid 6 write penalties be a consern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device. The unit can be opened and then access to the four servers with no additional laptop or equipment needed. IDRAC is great for us for remote management.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
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@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?" -
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
Back to your question about penalties for RAID 6, compared to your HDDs today, I'm guessing - only guessing - that you're still way ahead. As for the number of writes burn out with RAID 6 over RAID10/5, RAID 6 does write an additional parity block that RAID 5 doesn't, but RAID 10 literally doubles the number of rights to the whole array. But from an individual drive by drive, it don't think the number of writes is that different. @scottalanmiller what am I missing here?
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@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
@Dashrender Just had a look at the exact stats from DPACK. Average Daily Write: 1.8 TB. 58% read, 42% write across entire infrastructure. So, with the 800 GB SSD SATA Mix Use drives, would Raid6 be an issue based on 1.8 TB per day write? With that number, how long would I expect a 16 x 800 array in raid 6 to last?
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@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
@Dashrender Just had a look at the exact stats from DPACK. Average Daily Write: 1.8 TB. 58% read, 42% write across entire infrastructure. So, with the 800 GB SSD SATA Mix Use drives, would Raid6 be an issue based on 1.8 TB per day write? With that number, how long would I expect a 16 x 800 array in raid 6 to last?
This depends on your drives. But you're talking about 16 drives into 1.8 TB = 125.5 GB per drive/day (really it's more because of the party writes, so it might be more like 140 GB a day) What are the drives rated at for writes? Last time I looked at consumer drives they were north of 1 TB/day for 5+ years, perhaps way north.
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@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@scottalanmiller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
The KVM is good for us for local access as we'd not have a laptop or other device.
Wouldn't an old laptop be cheaper and easier than a KVM, though? Any why is there ever local access? I've never had a time when I wanted to do that.
Scott also rarely is in the same city as the gear he works on, so wanting it would be pointless.
That said, he does have a point. Assuming iDRAC is working, local access should never be needed, unless you are doing a hardware upgrade. With the hopefully rare amount of those, the expense of £1500 seems like a complete waste. Why not buy yourself a kickass laptop with that money instead.
Possibly, I will rethink that and see.
Regarding raid 6 though, any thoughts?
"Would raid 6 write penalties be a concern over using the mix use SSDs? We are around 50/50 r/w across our servers using DPACK hence using mix use once consolidated to four hosts. If we use raid 6 would they burn out faster over r10/5 due to any additional writes? Then, wed need write intensive?"A 50/50 r/w load doesn't tell us the amount of writes on average per day. If you read right 1 GB a day on average, it's not going to matter. But if you're writing 5 TB a day, that's another story.
@Dashrender Just had a look at the exact stats from DPACK. Average Daily Write: 1.8 TB. 58% read, 42% write across entire infrastructure. So, with the 800 GB SSD SATA Mix Use drives, would Raid6 be an issue based on 1.8 TB per day write? With that number, how long would I expect a 16 x 800 array in raid 6 to last?
This depends on your drives. But you're talking about 16 drives into 1.8 TB = 125.5 GB per drive/day (really it's more because of the party writes, so it might be more like 140 GB a day) What are the drives rated at for writes? Last time I looked at consumer drives they were north of 1 TB/day for 5+ years, perhaps way north.
@Dashrender The drives would be these: http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&sku=400-AFLT
Cannot find specs? Any good place to look drive specs up? Google hasn't really shown much.
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I don't have any specs, You might call dell and ask if they have a Whitepaper on the drive.
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@Dashrender said in Dell Quote... good price?:
I don't have any specs, You might call dell and ask if they have a Whitepaper on the drive.
So, Dell has said the drive is supported for 970 GB writes per day and 2.1 TB read per day. So that covers my needs quite easily. So, at 1.8 TB/day, we are fine. 140GB/drive/day is way less then 970 GB/drive/day.
Looks like raid6 will be fine for us.
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@travisdh1 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 For the pull out 1U KMM/KVM - make sure you have lots of room behind you / in the isle to pull it out. We have one and it always hits me square in the nuts when I pull it out.
Oh wait, I mean... that sucks..........It's no joke man, I need to reshuffle the rack so it's higher.
This is what happens when you work with all women lol no respect for common decency
(yes, that was a joke, the two ladies I work with really are truly awesome!)
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@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@travisdh1 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 For the pull out 1U KMM/KVM - make sure you have lots of room behind you / in the isle to pull it out. We have one and it always hits me square in the nuts when I pull it out.
Oh wait, I mean... that sucks..........It's no joke man, I need to reshuffle the rack so it's higher.
This is what happens when you work with all women lol no respect for common decency
(yes, that was a joke, the two ladies I work with really are truly awesome!)
Are you positive that situation wasn't pre-meditated by one of them?
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@travisdh1 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@travisdh1 said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@MattSpeller said in Dell Quote... good price?:
@Jimmy9008 For the pull out 1U KMM/KVM - make sure you have lots of room behind you / in the isle to pull it out. We have one and it always hits me square in the nuts when I pull it out.
Oh wait, I mean... that sucks..........It's no joke man, I need to reshuffle the rack so it's higher.
This is what happens when you work with all women lol no respect for common decency
(yes, that was a joke, the two ladies I work with really are truly awesome!)
Are you positive that situation wasn't pre-meditated by one of them?
lol - they are both less vertically gifted than myself, so the answer is actually yes
