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Any forums out there about SAN's ?.



 
 
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  #21  
Old December 17th 04, 06:26 AM
flux
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In article ,
Malcolm Weir wrote:

The company that I'm using to post this tried a few. They sucked.
And Apple has no idea how to support serious operations. Their
response seems to be "reformat/reinit and try again".


An obviously fabricated tale.
  #22  
Old December 17th 04, 06:28 AM
flux
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In article ,
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote:

I've never heard of the Apple Xserve RAID but I'm glad I now know about it,
for the price it seems damn good. It has most of the redundancy features I'm
after however it doesn't look like the controller of the Xserve has a backup


You can two controllers, but I don't think they talk to each other, so
there is no failover if one controller just quits.
  #23  
Old December 17th 04, 06:33 AM
flux
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In article ,
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote:

I've got to ask, why exactly did they suck, was the hardware prone to fail


Apple's consumer level hardware is regarded as the best in the industry
by Consumer Reports' readers. I don't know there are long term reviews
of the enterprise level hardware.

or was Apple support just **** poor ?. If they're a pile of crap then surely
Apple must know this, there must be some people out there who are happy with
it ?.


Apple's consumer level tech support is regarded as the best in the
industry by Consumer Reports' readers. I don't know if their enterprise
level support has been reviewed. Apple also has a public forum for the
Xserve hardware and RAID at
http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]

I imagine if there were unhappy customers, at least some would show up
here to let Apple know it.
  #24  
Old December 17th 04, 09:28 AM
Malcolm Weir
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On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 21:24:25 -0000, "Fatboy40" no one here, sorry
wrote:

On paper they seem like a reasonable bit of kit with dual everything (PSU's,
controllers etc.).

I've got to ask, why exactly did they suck, was the hardware prone to fail
or was Apple support just **** poor ?. If they're a pile of crap then surely
Apple must know this, there must be some people out there who are happy with
it ?.


RAID looks easy, but it isn't. The tricks lie in determining *how*
you know you've got a failure, what you do when you detect a possible
failure, what you do when you get a second fault, etc.

One common mistake that novice vendors often make is to omit a
mechanism to force a disk *back* into being valid after they've marked
it bad. If you've got a bad (set of) sector(s) somewhere, a common
error is to fault the entire array and make it inaccessible, despite
the fact that the rest of the disk isn't bad, and the problem sectors
lie in a chunk of disk space that you can happily ignore (e.g. it's
static data that you can recreate).

These things happen... and then aggravated by inept support who
haven't quite grown out of the "reformat and start again" mindset...

Malc.
  #25  
Old December 17th 04, 09:31 AM
Malcolm Weir
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On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 05:26:25 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Malcolm Weir wrote:

The company that I'm using to post this tried a few. They sucked.
And Apple has no idea how to support serious operations. Their
response seems to be "reformat/reinit and try again".


An obviously fabricated tale.


Flux is not only infantile, but stupid and a liar.

Try this, you idiot:
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/cw.ns...256E27000D5707

And then apologize for your lie.

Malc.
  #26  
Old December 17th 04, 09:34 AM
Malcolm Weir
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On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:56:52 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
Malcolm Weir wrote:

The silly little boy doesn't understand the difference between the
Toshiba 1.8 inch MK2004GAL drives used in an iPod (3600rpm) and the
drives used in high-end storage (15,000rpm).


The difference is that Toshiba is like a Timex, takes a licking and
keeps on ticking. Now trying throwing one of these unnamed "high-end
storage" devices on the couch on a regular basis-sometimes while it's
spinning--and seeing how long it lasts.


Unnamed? Are you *really* this ignorant?

Hitachi and Seagate are the common 15K drives.

As to your "point", why would anyone vaguely competent throw
enterprise storage on "the couch"? Where would a competent data
center employee *find* a couch in a data center?

And I'm mightily amused at the idea of using 20gb or 40gb 3600 rpm
drives as data center storage!

Still, that shows what sort of environment this flux kid has knowledge
of!

Malc.
  #27  
Old December 17th 04, 09:59 AM
Per Ekman
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Malcolm Weir writes:

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 05:26:25 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,


An obviously fabricated tale.


Flux is not only infantile, but stupid and a liar.

Try this, you idiot:
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/cw.ns...256E27000D5707

And then apologize for your lie.


A relevant quote here is "Never argue with an idiot. They drag you
down to their level and then beat you with experience."

Ignore him and move on.

*p
  #28  
Old December 17th 04, 12:20 PM
Fatboy40
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Faeandar,

For me it's all about the best components at the cheapest price and to be
honest it really should be SCSI for the disks otherwise I know I'm asking
for trouble.

My no. 1 choice is the EMC CX300 but I think that's out of my league, my no.
2 now seems to be the HP MSA1000 (specifically the kit version they produce
with a switch and two HBA's (which seem to be rebranded Qlogic)).

I think I'll start a seperate thread about the HP hardware to see if anyone
has any opinions on it (and use Google Groups for research), for around
£10,000 I could setup a pretty good SAN using the MSA1000 and HP
resellers/support companies are all over the place and at a later date add
backup switches/controllers etc..

"Faeandar" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 09:39:24 -0000, "Fatboy40" no one here, sorry
wrote:

I think this is the perfect forum, and honestly it could use more
traffic so post away....

I didn't catch how large you wanted to make this but unless you're
really tied to EMC or HP there are alot of other array mfg's that make
very good array's. And all that makes a SAN is the switch, so buy
what you can get or what is supported. Brocade, McData, and Cisco fit
just about everyone's support matrix.

~F



  #29  
Old December 17th 04, 01:55 PM
Wolf
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"flux" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote:

Years ago, I would say there was a significant distinction between the
"high-end" drives and the "low-end" But "low-end" drives are much better
and are really no longer "low-end". For example, even the "low-end"
drives used in consumer devices like Tivo and the iPod have decent
throughput and reliability. Tivo is intended to operate 24/7 and iPods
are MP3 players, which are prone to being dropped and tossed around.

Anyway, here is an excellent article about a "beer-budget" SAN:
http://www.nwc.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1519ws1


I am not a storage guru, I run a world class hpc cluster and have had
to get a grip on storage in our environment. Most storage vendors we
have talked to call them "tier-2" storage and we have talked to a bunch.
Our leveraged storage group calls them tier-2 storage (usually looking
down their nose) and most of my peer in other companies call them the
same thing. So I will most likely keep calling them that.

While I think it is beginning to change, corporations-specially large
ones have a tendency not to want to use ATA drives for their primary
storage needs. Ask around and you will be told how these drives just
do not measure up to fibre and SCSI drives. You can never get fired
getting a Fibre Netapp or a Fibre SAN.

Cluster guys are statistics whores. We analyze and test everything to
death before it goes on-line-cause one you are on-line you can't stop
production. Part of our acceptance procedure is to run anything we get
through a beater job composed of a home grown disk tester that keeps
statistics and an mpi linpack that kill memory. We always bust cache
when testing performance. And we run it for at least 7 days-even under
unbearable pressures to get it on-line.

We have some 150TB going on 180TB - what we will retire. Unlike
most environments we ride our storage very very hard-and of course we
have the stats to prove it! We also do not do any backups-because with
this amount of data it is actually easier to recreate it (and a whole lot
cheaper) so not losing data is very important.

Here's what I have learned about ATA drives do fail a little more often.
But if we have our vendor burn it in, and we run through our process
(cluster guys are also very anal about the process) we will fail the weak
drives (and CPU and memory etc) before they go into production. Make
sure you scrub the disks (3ware calls it verify) on a weekly basis.

Going backwards, we have a CX500 test box w/ 18TB which we have
beating like a red-headed step child with 2 Opterons. We have pushed
some 330MB on on controller. This box helped get a good build for the
head nodes and for the last 90 days have spent their entire lives in our
office
getting hammered. We lost one drive the first week.

Going back over this year, we have 50TB of Netapp R200. We have had
to replace 4 disks. 2 failed, 2 were going to fail.

Over 18 months, 50TB of commodity ATA drives w/ 3ware cards purchased
30 and then 20 6 months later. These boxes were vendor supplied and
maintained
as NAS boxes. It used RH9 and XFS and we broke it. It took and 80 node job
3.5 days but it broke it 100% of the time. So we had to develop our own
build
and we really cleaned up the installation process. Our second 20 TB we had
them
burn in on their end for 72 hours and then we run our beater jobs. We lose
one or
two drives a month in this group (320 or so total)

So what is our new beer-budget SAN? A CX700 with 30+ TB (usable) of ATA
drives!!! Merry Xmas to ya'll.

--
Wolf
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  #30  
Old December 17th 04, 03:56 PM
Maxim S. Shatskih
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Hitachi and Seagate are the common 15K drives.

Hitachi? Ex-IBM UltraStars?

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation

http://www.storagecraft.com


 




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