Storage Area Network Solutions? 23
TJPile asks: "I work for a larger advertising company with offices all over the US and soon Europe and Asia. Due to our growth in the past year, our current archive/storage system cannot fulfill our needs. Others in my IT team have been talking with Dell about a storage area network. I will be the one administering this system and I was wondering if anyone in the Slashdot community has ever dealt with this before. I know we will be needing some heavy metal along the lines of an SMP Sun or SGI box. We need a system that can support (at max) about 100 simultaneous users working on large image files stored on the server. We also need cataloging software that will allow PC/Mac users to browse documents via thumbnails and job numbers. What do you guys think?" The previous two articles that touched on this subject didn't get much traffic, and were posted at least 6 months ago. Has the intervening time provided more advancements in this area?
Think NetApp. (Score:3)
Very impressive, relatively cheap... And oh yeah -- no Sun box required since they just hook straight up to your LAN. (100Mb, or 1,000Mb Ethernet...)
-JF
Buy this, don't build it. You will save grief. (Score:3)
A major part of the operation of this sort of system is tuning it to the actual data and use patterns of your particular users. Note that not all of your users are the same, and that you will probably have to compromise on the tuning. Even though systems like this are supposed to be redundant, don't forget to build in enough network capacity for data backup servers.
Best bet is to buy a Network Appliance or one of the SUN arrays, and get it over with. Of the two I would go with the Net App boxes.
The other factor is the networking outside of your SAN, that is, now that you have the data online how do your processors get to it? If you are doing image-at-a-time load-work-save sorts of work patterns, then you will have less of a traffic load. If you are doing batch image processing one-right-after-another, then you are going to need all the bandwidth you can get. Doing larger geo models, we found that gigabit ethernet was needed from workstations (SGI Octanes) down to the storage farm. Trunked ethernet just didn't do it.
YMMV. Get a sniffer and do a study on your traffic to get a feel for what you need.
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:2)
However, I think NetApps are GREAT, and should work well in the setting in question, provided that lag from the other side of the ocean isn't going to be an issue. NetApps are Alpha boxes, with tons of disks on them, they can be clustered for redundancy and are fast and reliable. I've gotten 12,000 ops/sec from them.
But since the situation involves 2 continents, I believe that a true SAN should be the solution. maybe outsourcing to a company like StorageNetworks [storagenetworks.com] might be an option.
It depensd on how serious your firm is... (Score:1)
Regards
ps: I know this sounds like a lot of marketing, but when you have such a complex situation as massive shared storage that needs uber uptime and so on, I can't really convey how happy it makes you to find a solution that Just Plain Works. I call it like I see it, no intra-ass sunshine blowing.
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:1)
Perhaps you might want to give a clearer explanation of the differences? ;-)
Re:Buy this, don't build it. You will save grief. (Score:1)
Storage Area Networks (Score:1)
networks. It cant run over ip. I would suggest
you setup the following..
A Sun Enterprise 4500 with 4 A5500 storage arrays mirrored, connected via fiber channel to the 6500. The 4500 would have 16 processors and 4 gig of ram. That should easily handle 100 high end graphics users and permit the pc users to browse via cifs/nfs, thumbnails.
Malice95
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:1)
Everything jfrisby said is straight-up good.
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Re:Cliff (Score:2)
Re:It depends on how serious your firm is... (Score:2)
An alternate solution is their Data General division, which makes the Clar iio n [emc.com] disk arrays and SAN. We actually bought one of these puppies and it should be delivered sometime next week (at which time no one will ever read this thread again since /. threads have a half-life of about two hours so me following up with status is useless...)
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:2)
The big difference is that a NAS is basically a fileserver, and a SAN is a network of disks. A SAN needs to be attached via a traditional disk attachment(scsi or fibrechannel), while a NAS is ethernet based(be it 10/100/1000/etc).
The advantage of a NAS is definitely cost. it's cheaper and way easier to install and maintain.
The advantage of a SAN is that it is a network of "disks" or nodes, and data is replicated between those nodes, you can have a nodes all in one space, or in separate datacenters, london, ny, la, etc. The SAN takes care of making the data available to the servers attached to it, no matter where the location is, but the server -must- be attached to the SAN in some way to access the data or to share the data.
A cheaper alternative to netapps are the new IDE NAS's maxtor, quantum, have made these with IDE disks, based on linux, RAID5 in most cases going up to 480GB in a 1U or 2U case. pretty cheap and quick storage considering it's plug and use.
The advantages for the netapps is that they have a very cool filesystem/operating system with snapshop capabilities.. this means that it literally takes a snapshot of the disk at a given time, say every midnight, and keeps the snapshot accessible from anywhere in the filesystem in
SGI + XFS = schweet (Score:2)
SGI box + SGI StudioCentral (Score:1)
ccg
SAN Datadirector + SANds (Score:1)
A 486 with Loads of SCSI Storage -- Seriously (Score:2)
we will be needing some heavy metal along the lines of an SMP Sun or SGI box. We need a system that can support (at max) about 100 simultaneous users working on large image files stored on the server.
The newspaper I work for has 75-85 ad builders (30 or so a shift) working on Macs. They regularly work with full page ads that are more than 70 meg each (color doubletruck runs 230 meg or so). For the past four years, they've been using a single processor (486DX-66) Novell server (hardware by Tricord) with 270 gig of SCSI disk space and 512 meg of RAM. It has a pair of 10mbps NICs. It has an uptime of more than two years. This machine is probably half of what you need. It's slow but rock solid.
We're replacing it before the end of the year with a big IBM Netfinity with four PIII processors, 320 gig of disk space, four 100mbps NICs (one per ad subnet and a hot spare) and a gig of RAM. I suspect that this would do what you need it to do and then some.
We also need cataloging software that will allow PC/Mac users to browse documents via thumbnails and job numbers.
CCI's AdDesk [ccieurope.com] is your overall solution. We (the Orlando Sentinel [orlandosentinel.com] who I am not speaking for) have used it for several years now. If you look at the top 25 newspapers in the world, more than half will be using CCI's products for either Editorial or Advertising.
AdDesk ain't great but it's the best available in terms of a full-featured, highly-expandable, highly-customizable solution. It's built on top of standard applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) held together by common (Oracle, TCL, etc.) running on either AIX or Solaris.
What do you guys think?
I think you have two choices. You can go cheap, buy some heavy hardware and put an operating system on it. Or, you can go with an AdDesk-like solution, spend a bunch of money and have a real advertising creation environment. It all depends on the size of your budget.
InitZero
Re:SGI + XFS = schweet (Score:1)
SAN != NFS,CIFS (Score:2)
NAS is nice since there are a lot of simple off-the-shelf solutions that allow you to put a bunch of disks up with a server that can be accessed by many computers at the same time for both reading and writing. NFS is simple old technology with support in any $500 Linux box with a $20 ethernet card. The disadvantage is that it is slow ... as much as 100x slower than local hard drives due to all of the networking overhead.
True SAN gets rid of the TCP/IP and NFS and just directly attaches disks to computers using something like a Fibre network (SCSI-3). This is blazingly fast (approximately local HD speeds), but requires more complex networking. Since each computer is basically mounting SCSI devices, you also don't have any easy way to have multiple computers that can read and write from the same SAN storage. Shared-SAN software is in the pipeline from Tivoli and Veritas, but you might want to take a look at Global File System [sistina.com], which allows you to have multiple Linux boxes on a Fibre SAN (or SCSI bus!) read and write from the same disks.
Go with a REAL imaging solution (Score:1)
I have installed and supported systems of 250+ users that ran fine on a few (2 or 3) NT boxen, I can just imagine how screaming they run on HPUX, AIX, or solaris (no linux support yet ;(.
Thier software scales better than any other imaging product out there, and an imaging solution is really what you are after, not a SAN.
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:1)
"Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"
Re:Think NetApp. (Score:1)
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Re:It depends on how serious your firm is... (Score:1)
You don't want a SAN (Score:2)
What you're -really- looking for is a combination of technologies. You need fileservers at each of your locations to serve the local clients, then you want replication between the fileservers. You do not want to try and run NFS over a WAN. Especially not the distances you are talking about. The timeouts will drive you mad.
So, I reccomend NetApp. They're a finalist in our search for home directory storage, but we don't own any. However, I've read a lot. They have a technology that will keep multiple NetApps in sync over long distances. Go this route and you'll have high speed storage for your local clients while keeping the data in sync between your locations (they send block level deltas, if you care).
So, check NetApp. Read their white papers. This has already been solved. Don't reinvent the wheel.
Depends on how much money you want to waste... (Score:1)
EMC will sell you an incredibly expensive system that is not particularly fast (for what you pay) and does not play well with any other type of storage system (especially in SAN environments)
I can think of very few situations where EMC's advanced software features, bulletproof uptime and excellent service organization make sense and are worth the obscene price premium that EMC charges.
Nine times out of ten, especially when thinking about fibre channel and SAN stuff it makes much more sense to deal with a vendor that makes interoperable hardware based on open systems and standards. You can save tons of money, get better performance and avoid vendor lock-in all at once.
My 7TB+ SAN needed to play niceley with Alpha, Sun, SGI, HP, Linux & Wintel all at once. I ended up going with Brocade FC switches and Compaq Storageworks disks & controllers.
Mind you I like the EMC product line but my personal opinion is that EMC is not worth the price in most cases - especially where the customer has no need or interest in getting the advanced software and hardware features that EMC sells as options.
Just my $.02.