Hardware
Searching for storage: Tegile
Jan 11th
I promised some followers of this blog that I’d post some thoughts on what I am looking at and the progress of my evaluations.
Unfortunately we also did an office move in the intervening period and guess who didn’t have time?
Oh sandbox, you need to grow
Nov 21st
The buildup of our new sandbox for internal learning has run for a week and already we are running out of resources.
Five old Dell PE1430 with 2 4-core processors but they max out at 8 GiB of RAM. That’s 40 GiB total for 7-8 people. This is a little tight.
Digging through dead server storage(tm) I have found a few old PE1950 boxes with old school Xeon processors. Gonna see what I can harvest from other old servers in DSS(tm) and give these servers as much RAM as possible. And I’ll need to find ethernet ports as the sandbox requires 3 to fully operate.
Fun times! I am very excited to see my staff learning how VMware works, how vCloud Director does its thing, how all of this magic really is not all that difficult to digest. Hats off to you ipHouse employees!
Storage, storage STORAGE!
Jun 10th
SInce last month, our Nexenta based storage cluster has been deployed and I have now moved production data onto it.
A bump and bruise occurred last weekend (I had done an announcement already) and yesterday things burped again.
The problem? Looks like an issue with the 2 mirrored boot drives of the first head unit (each head manages its own volumes and HA is used to make sure a single head failure doesn’t cause an outage) are … bad.
One drive has full on SMART failure via the BIOS. Interesting…so replace that drive with another from the shelf…and the other drive is showing something ‘odd’. Yank it out, replace it, and move it another machine for testing.
And it is failing as well! Four hard disks, 2 per head unit, and 2 fail in one head unit, what are the chances of that? (the second head unit does not exhibit any of the same symptoms)
A storage cluster is born
May 19th
It is time to add space to our VMware cluster for storage of VMs for our customers.
We started initially using Compellent SAN storage. Worked well, had a lot of space, but the performance was not what I was looking for (it is all SATA based), using F/C is far more complicated than we need for this project, and just plain expensive to upgrade (adding a shelf of 16 450GB SAS disks is more expensive than the solution presented here).
Spin forward a few months, I took one of our older NetApp FAS270c systems and ripped out the 73GB 10K disks, went to eBay and purchased 2 shelves of 300GB 10K F/C disks and after an afternoon of shuffling we had ourselves a cluster for storage. Performance is absolutely great (and predictable). Expanding it? Expensive, just like the Compellent, and I also wanted to investigate some of the new things that can be done with storage, like inline (and synchronous) compression and data deduplication.
History lesson: Years and years ago I did a lot with Solaris and I have kept my feet wet playing with OpenSolaris and ZFS. I won’t bore you with the great details of why ZFS is the shit (links at the bottom of the post) or why Solaris needs to live on forever (because no one can thread at the kernel level like Solaris), but I will tell you that using Solaris (or OpenSolaris) with ZFS is a combination that is very tough to beat. So last year I used the Sun Try-and-Buy program to test out a 7110 and I absolutely loved the interface, and the price drop that occurred while I had it! But someone within Sun decided that no, as a TaB customer the new pricing is not available. I was floored by this. I shipped back the 7110, and anyway, I really wanted a cluster, not a single head, single JBOD enclosure.
In the end I wanted a cluster!
That’s 2 heads, automatic failover, etherchannel/trunk/IPMP/LACP oh hell, I just wanted multiple ethernets bound together if possible, basic reporting (I can SNMP for the real stuff), and finally, a price tag that I can feel good about for storage of our customer data.
This is where NexentaStor comes in! They have the pieces all put together so I don’t have to self-engineer something. I have a vendor I can harass or ask questions of. I can focus on what makes my business work instead of working to make my business stable.
