Looking to Buy a SAN
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
Each server has 8 10gb nics for the storage network. We have the switches for the storage network already.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
Each server has 8 10gb nics for the storage network. We have the switches for the storage network already.
So someone decided on the storage technology as well (iSCSI?) before deciding on the SANs? This, too, begs the question... how did they know that they wanted that networking technology (and which one is it) without having known the exact model of SAN that would work best beforehand?
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
Right, normally you'd expect FibreChannel for a big, dedicated SAN setup, for example, but you'd not necessarily want to commit to it. But you have to know both your vendor and your model, and a ton of other factors, before you can get even the HBAs.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
The HPE engineer we talked said that's not really the case with them anymore, and they are designed much better these days to handle fault issues.
Aside from that we already have bought 5 new hosts (1U hosts with just SD cards for VMware)
Never, EVER listen to a salesman. Their job is to tell.you lies and take your money.
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We're doing FCoE, not Iscsi for sure.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
We're doing FCoE, not Iscsi for sure.
Then why so many 10 GigE ports?
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
So - @ScottyBoy
Do you want assistance engineering a real solution for the business case? or
Do you just want a SAN because that's what someone at the company has already signed off on?If option 1 - please tell us the goals of this project,
if option 2 - frankly, almost anything your sales guy is pitching is likely going to function for a time, until it doesn't. Assuming you get three years out of it, you'll likely be off the hook for any issues that arise at the point.How about it? which option would you like help with?
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
We're doing FCoE, not Iscsi for sure.
Then why so many 10 GigE ports?
FCoE uses the same ports as iSCSI. It's just not as fast as the newer iSCSI like Starwind is doing.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
So - @ScottyBoy
Do you want assistance engineering a real solution for the business case? or
Do you just want a SAN because that's what someone at the company has already signed off on?If option 1 - please tell us the goals of this project,
if option 2 - frankly, almost anything your sales guy is pitching is likely going to function for a time, until it doesn't. Assuming you get three years out of it, you'll likely be off the hook for any issues that arise at the point.How about it? which option would you like help with?
We're happy to do either, we just need to understand how much we should "help". It can easily go either way. If we guess, we are guaranteed to get it wrong
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
We're doing FCoE, not Iscsi for sure.
Then why so many 10 GigE ports?
FCoE uses the same ports as iSCSI. It's just not as fast as the newer iSCSI like Starwind is doing.
oh - my bad.. I read it wrong.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
We're doing FCoE, not Iscsi for sure.
Then why so many 10 GigE ports?
FCoE uses the same ports as iSCSI. It's just not as fast as the newer iSCSI like Starwind is doing.
oh - my bad.. I read it wrong.
iSER is the fast iSCSI, if I remember. Insanely fast without needing the FC infrastructure.
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Yeah, just checked, it iSER. It puts iSCSI directly over RDMA so it's crazy fast and straight through the RAM channel. You can do it on Infiniband so that it is faster than FC or Ethernet can do.
https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/ESF/FCoE-vs-iSCSI-vs-iSER-Final.pdf
iSER was presented at MangoCon 2018. Max gave a good talk on it.
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I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
Yeah, just checked, it iSER. It puts iSCSI directly over RDMA so it's crazy fast and straight through the RAM channel. You can do it on Infiniband so that it is faster than FC or Ethernet can do.
https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/ESF/FCoE-vs-iSCSI-vs-iSER-Final.pdf
iSER was presented at MangoCon 2018. Max gave a good talk on it.
I believe NVMe-oF (NVMe over Fabric) has the highest performance nowadays and is expected to replace iSCSI (and iSER). It can also use RDMA but uses the much leaner NVMe protocol so it will always be faster over the same type of connection.
https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/news/iSCSI-Future-Cloud-Storage-Doomed-NVMe-oF.pdf -
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
Nah, you still could easily use cloud. It just requires a complete rethinking of how to provide needed services. Which I doubt anyone there would even entertain the ideas given the current track record.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
Sure, while cloud is nice for certain workloads, it's hardly a general place replacement for local systems in most businesses today. Some stuff, sure, but loads and loads of cases where in house servers are still absolutely the only sensible thing. Over 90% of our clients don't even have cloud as an option either.
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@travisdh1 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
Nah, you still could easily use cloud. It just requires a complete rethinking of how to provide needed services. Which I doubt anyone there would even entertain the ideas given the current track record.
He means hosted cloud and in many, many cases it wouldn't be an option at all. If they are doing this for lots of video processing, for example, the latency might easily make it impossible. Or streaming rates. Could they get a nearby cloud and build their own dedicated network to it with $100,000 a month custom pipe? Maybe. But for something like a TV station it's easy to see that getting completely off into la la land to try to go cloud. It's not that it is strictly "impossible", but it is very, very easily "difficult to the point of essentially impossible". Like, can you use an array of 10,000 floppies as your storage... technically yes but... no.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.
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@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@flaxking said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I've recognized an IPOD and witnessed it play out.
In the end the business decided it made more financial sense to put 200 VMs in Azure.
This is for a TV station cloud simply isn't an option to run this stuff unfortunately.
My point is that putting a bunch of VMs in Azure is a pretty expensive solution, but dealing with an IPOD ends up costing the business enough that the cost is acceptable.
The other solution is to not design an IPOD.
