A big thumbs up for Nexenta Storage
OK I'm stuck at work for a few more minutes waiting for a job to finish so I'll throw out a bit of info regarding my newly built Nexenta storage platform.
Based in part from sticker shock looking at Dell or HP low end storage devices as well as on the advice from Mike from over at IPHouse.net, I bought some Super Micro parts and built the storage cluster myself. I started with a 836E2-R800B 3U chassis just for housing the disks. I wonder if there is some kind of cheat sheet for Super Micro products because it seems confusing as hell. I will clue you in that the E2 on the end signifies dual input/output SAS connections. The SAS connections plug into a Super Micro 6016T-NTRF4+
1U Server. I'm sad to say that I have absolutely no idea what all those letters signify. I just picked the one Mike picked (although I've since ordered another server with a different config so I can start to compare). I stuck 2 Intel E5620
processors in it, 12GB of DDR3 RAM and a couple drives to mirror for the OS and I was done. Well except for the initial allotment of 10 Seagate Barracuda ES 1 TB 7200RPM SAS 3Gb/s 16 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive
drives and a JBOD Uio Lsisas 068E Raid 8CH Sas 16MB Pcie
SAS card, a power control board SUPERMCIRO AC CSEPT-JBOD-CB1 Power Control Board
(since the storage chassis won't have a motherboard to handle power issues) and a couple sets each of cables (CBL-0168L,CBL-0166L). Did I mention all the parts?? Luckily my supplier decided to ship me each part individually so I had boxes coming in for days (grrrr).
After all the hardware finally arrived and was assembled, including the 45 minutes spent trying to figure out what is supposed to plug into the power fault connection on the Power Control Card (We never did figure it out, so I chose my typical method for resolving all my problems, just ignore it and hope it works out OK). Next up was pop in the Nexenta CD, power up the server and 20 minutes later I've got a brand new shiny SAN. There are some standard network config questions to answer on the console, followed by pointing a web browser at the network location you just set up and you're faced with a nice management GUI. There is a great Wizard that walks you through the initial setup process and just like that you're done.
We are using iSCSI as our method for connecting to the storage, and I must admit I was a little concerned about that part. My last experience with iSCSI was at least the Windows 2000 server days, if not NT and all I remembered was one problem after another. Imagine my surprise to discover my Windows 2008 R2 server includes the iSCSI initiator right on the Administrative tools menu. I entered my IP address in the Target box hit the quick connect button and my target appeared. Off to the Volumes and Devices tab where I hit the Auto Configure button (right,like this will work) and just like that, all my storage devices appeared, already configured to auto reconnect at restart. In short I was done. Wow. There is an additional step to perform on the Nexenta if you want to restrict visibility of the volumes to a specific host target but it's nothing too complicated.
So just like that I'm pushing my new SAN into backup duties. So far one of the great things I've found is the richness of the stats I can get from the box. I'm sure this is due to the Sun Open Storage platform but comparing it to our IBM DS3400 (which is the only other storage device I've had any experience with) it truly is wonderful. Every metric I can think of (down to the individual disk level), built in Deduping (which should be great for backup data), built in compressing of the iSCSI volumes, man I can't wait to watch this thing run. One of the nice things about Sun Open Storage is if my needs change where reads become important I can pick up an SSD drive, pop it in a drive bay and a few mouse clicks later I can have a large fast cache device. I have to say I'm itching to point a SQL Server instance at it just to see what it can do, but before that happens we will need redundant network paths and switches and extra ports on servers and who knows what else. Although I suppose I could always host our dedicated read only reporting instance there.
Anyway, enough of that. Here are a few quick photos of the management screen:
Based in part from sticker shock looking at Dell or HP low end storage devices as well as on the advice from Mike from over at IPHouse.net, I bought some Super Micro parts and built the storage cluster myself. I started with a 836E2-R800B 3U chassis just for housing the disks. I wonder if there is some kind of cheat sheet for Super Micro products because it seems confusing as hell. I will clue you in that the E2 on the end signifies dual input/output SAS connections. The SAS connections plug into a Super Micro 6016T-NTRF4+
1U Server. I'm sad to say that I have absolutely no idea what all those letters signify. I just picked the one Mike picked (although I've since ordered another server with a different config so I can start to compare). I stuck 2 Intel E5620 processors in it, 12GB of DDR3 RAM and a couple drives to mirror for the OS and I was done. Well except for the initial allotment of 10 Seagate Barracuda ES 1 TB 7200RPM SAS 3Gb/s 16 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive drives and a JBOD Uio Lsisas 068E Raid 8CH Sas 16MB Pcie SAS card, a power control board SUPERMCIRO AC CSEPT-JBOD-CB1 Power Control Board (since the storage chassis won't have a motherboard to handle power issues) and a couple sets each of cables (CBL-0168L,CBL-0166L). Did I mention all the parts?? Luckily my supplier decided to ship me each part individually so I had boxes coming in for days (grrrr).After all the hardware finally arrived and was assembled, including the 45 minutes spent trying to figure out what is supposed to plug into the power fault connection on the Power Control Card (We never did figure it out, so I chose my typical method for resolving all my problems, just ignore it and hope it works out OK). Next up was pop in the Nexenta CD, power up the server and 20 minutes later I've got a brand new shiny SAN. There are some standard network config questions to answer on the console, followed by pointing a web browser at the network location you just set up and you're faced with a nice management GUI. There is a great Wizard that walks you through the initial setup process and just like that you're done.
We are using iSCSI as our method for connecting to the storage, and I must admit I was a little concerned about that part. My last experience with iSCSI was at least the Windows 2000 server days, if not NT and all I remembered was one problem after another. Imagine my surprise to discover my Windows 2008 R2 server includes the iSCSI initiator right on the Administrative tools menu. I entered my IP address in the Target box hit the quick connect button and my target appeared. Off to the Volumes and Devices tab where I hit the Auto Configure button (right,like this will work) and just like that, all my storage devices appeared, already configured to auto reconnect at restart. In short I was done. Wow. There is an additional step to perform on the Nexenta if you want to restrict visibility of the volumes to a specific host target but it's nothing too complicated.
So just like that I'm pushing my new SAN into backup duties. So far one of the great things I've found is the richness of the stats I can get from the box. I'm sure this is due to the Sun Open Storage platform but comparing it to our IBM DS3400 (which is the only other storage device I've had any experience with) it truly is wonderful. Every metric I can think of (down to the individual disk level), built in Deduping (which should be great for backup data), built in compressing of the iSCSI volumes, man I can't wait to watch this thing run. One of the nice things about Sun Open Storage is if my needs change where reads become important I can pick up an SSD drive, pop it in a drive bay and a few mouse clicks later I can have a large fast cache device. I have to say I'm itching to point a SQL Server instance at it just to see what it can do, but before that happens we will need redundant network paths and switches and extra ports on servers and who knows what else. Although I suppose I could always host our dedicated read only reporting instance there.
Anyway, enough of that. Here are a few quick photos of the management screen:
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