Supermicro recommendation

[sielbear]

Brilliant! I'm interested to know your thoughts on the chassis - from the web site it looks promising, and I'm hoping it's decent quality.

[caleb72]

All in all it is a nice chassis. It uses the spring loaded thumb screws like HP uses and it only has four of them, two on the back one for lid and another for riser assembly, two inside on riser assembly and 2.5 inch mount. Everything fits together well. The cables for internal drives are just long enough to connect to main board and be routed through cable management.
The drive carriers are metal except for the locking mechanism, it is plastic. Not sure how I feel about them yet, I have seen worse as far as the plastic carriers go, but they seem sturdy enough.
The only real complaint I have is the fan/memory air shroud. It is made of a flimsy, origami folded plastic. Would have liked to seen a molded plastic piece, but it does fit well.

[anton (staff)]

1) Both configurations are excellent. I prefer Intel but it's just my taste

2) Stick with RAID10 or RAID6. Stay away from RAID5 b/c obvious reasons (double-fault is going to kill your data).

[sielbear]

I can now confirm Caleb's thoughts on the chassis. I fought with the air shroud for 10 minutes until I realized I could completely remove it from the chassis. Overall I'm impressed with both the system's design and performance of the RAID module (not the add-in PCI card, but the board to board module). I do with the metal was a tad thicker, particularly where the hotswap cage meshes with the rest of the chassis.

We're experimenting with 5 x 256 GB SSDs in RAID 5 and 7 x 2 TB SATA in RAID 6. So far on the SSDs we're peaking at 830 MB read, 360 MB write, and over 100,000 IOPS. On the SATA, we're 621 MB Read and 273 MB Write - IOPS much lower, but don't have the numbers in front of me on those drives.

The only semi steep learning curve is the EFI bios update process. Once we figured that out, I'm an Intel chassis cheerleader!

[sielbear]

BTW - we will be setting up a CDP volume on the SATA drives to mirror the SSDs. That should provide decent protection from an instantaneous failure. Additionally, the virtual servers are being backed up to a third device with Shadow Protect.

[anton (staff)]

Why not use StarWind built-in replication thing? Just my $0.02

BTW - we will be setting up a CDP volume on the SATA drives to mirror the SSDs. That should provide decent protection from an instantaneous failure. Additionally, the virtual servers are being backed up to a third device with Shadow Protect.

[sielbear]

I'm really glad you chimed in - I was just going to ask 1.) is it possible to have a CDP / Snapshot volume that's a RAID1 mirror? 2.) If not, am I better off with a RAID1 mirror or CDP / Snapshot with point in time recovery options?

Lastly, is it possible to have CDP / Snapshot functionality residing on a second physical volume? I.e. use SSDs for web server and write point in time backups to the SATA volume?

[anton (staff)]

You can definitely use CDP volume as destination with a snapshots. There's one issue however. And HUGE one - snapshots are not going to be consistant as we cannot track down and/or hold writes with our VSS agent. However good news - VMFS f.e. has atomic writes so it should work for 99% of the cases.

I'm really glad you chimed in - I was just going to ask 1.) is it possible to have a CDP / Snapshot volume that's a RAID1 mirror? 2.) If not, am I better off with a RAID1 mirror or CDP / Snapshot with point in time recovery options?

Lastly, is it possible to have CDP / Snapshot functionality residing on a second physical volume? I.e. use SSDs for web server and write point in time backups to the SATA volume?

[robr]

I'm looking at building a Starwind based SAN running Windows Server 2008 R2 as a target for Hyper-V based VMs. Currently, I have several Dell blades with 8 processor cores, 32gig of memory and only 160gig of disk space on each (15K RPM SAS x 2 - RAID 0), so very limited on space for VMs. I was looking through the forum for hardware suggestions and looks like this is the king of forum threads for that. I'm just wondering if based on the last 6 months, any recommendations here would change either due to 1) experience now that you've been using the configs listed here for a while or b) new technology.

I'm also wondering about the feature set I list below. I realize many of these rely on hardware choices rather than StarWind itself. Any particular comments about my requirements relating to the hardware choices in this thread?

Thanks, Rob

I've previously worked with EqualLogic PS4000s, but I'm looking for something that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for storage and is a lot more flexible.
I'm looking for
- iSCSI
- accepts standard off the shelf SATA drives
- accepts drives of all different sizes (for example, so I can join a 4TB drive to an already built array or 2TB drives when those become available someday)
- allows you to add drives to the array any time you like (ie I can expand an already built array)

Would be nice
- expandable (ie can chain multiple chassis)
- hot pluggable
- utilizes all available space on each drive even if drives are different sizes
- decent management UI
- support for RAID-0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50
- can have multiple spares
- can create multiple arrays within a single chassis
- accepts SATA and SAS drives

[robr]

Turns out a 10GB card is available for the rack chassis (Broadcom based).
How do you guys feel about this switch? It supports jumbo packets, dunno if it's global or per port, but I can easily dedicate this switch to the SAN.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833122156

Also any recommendation for a 10gb NIC for the SAN?

[Max (staff)]

Netgear proved to be a good player on the networking stuff field so I think this particular hardware is not an exception.
We do not have any particular model recommendations, 2 main recommendations are - reliability and 9k Jumbo frame support

As for storage hardware/software requirements

- iSCSI

Solid positive

- accepts standard off the shelf SATA drives

Any drives, positive

- accepts drives of all different sizes (for example, so I can join a 4TB drive to an already built array or 2TB drives when those become available someday)

More dependent on the OS you will run, if it does recognize it correctly - StarWind will too.

- allows you to add drives to the array any time you like (ie I can expand an already built array)

You will be able to extend the targets you have created before. Physical storage extension may be limited only by the hardware.

Would be nice
- expandable (ie can chain multiple chassis)

More hardware dependent, but we're already made the mirroring functionality between physical boxes.

- hot pluggable

Hmm, not sure if i got this correctly (if you mean hard disks - this also depends on the servers)

- utilizes all available space on each drive even if drives are different sizes

About 99% will be ok ?:)

- decent management UI

Easy-to-use, centralized and intuitive. You can even manage your infrastructure from a netbook while having a cocktail on the beach.

- support for RAID-0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50

We've got it

- can have multiple spares

Now only one available, we'll make 2 more in future

- can create multiple arrays within a single chassis

Of course

- accepts SATA and SAS drives

It's also on the OS level