Extend storage recommendation

[nscenter]

Good day everyone.

We have one Dell Powervault MD3220i with 18x 900GB 10K Rpm drives that currently running out of space. We are planning to attach to it an MD1220 with a 6Gb SAS Cable and having 18x 600GB 15K rpm drives and 4x800GB SSD.

We pretend to move to the SSD volume some of the most I/O intensive servers at least one app server and one exchange server and to use this SSD volumen for VMs snapshot so it can improve the time it takes backup software to create/remove the snapshot wich currently limit us to not run backups/replicas on production hours so our RPO is about 24 hours and we are looking to low that.

Please let me know your thoughts/recommendation on this or better ways to improve it.

Thanks in advance

[JarryG]

I would go SSD-way right now. Reason is simple: SAS/15k drives start today at ~$600/TB, quite good enterprise-level SSDs (i.e. SM863) cost about the same. But performance difference is very high (iops, transfer-rate, access time, etc)...

[nscenter]

Thanks for replyJarryGJarryG, 

With Dell specific a 800GB SSD MLC  cost about 1,300 USD  while a 900GB 10K RPM SAS is about 600 USD.  So there is a pretty considerable price diff.   Not sure if the samsung model you point would on this NAS.   I'll have a look about it.

Thanks.

[JarryG]

Not sure about "Dell-specific", but some time ago I learned that "HP-specific" drives are nothing more, than re-branded Seagates. We bought quite expensive "HP-drive". There was sticker on it. I removed it, and underneath it was "Seagate" (type which was priced less than half of HP-drive). The same with DIMM-modules: we paid much more just to get quite common Kingstonn-DIMM, but with nice extra HP-sticker on it...

Dell does not make its own SSDs. It takes SSDs probably from Intel, or Seagate. But it might use slightly modified firmware (sometimes with as little modification as different id-string). And this is common for many other components (i.e. raid-controllers: you can find the same LSI-controller re-branded to Dell Perc, IBM Mxxx or Fujitsu Dxxx).

[nscenter]

I totally agree with you on that JarryGJarryG , and I believe all that branding and stuff It is probably a way that manufacturers use to force its customer to keep buying from them despite some components may be obtained from other suppliers.

[suvrobhattachar]

How many VMs and what kind of Apps you are going to run in your environment ?

[nscenter]

Hello suvrobhattacharya123suvrobhattacharya123     ,

There area about 50 VMs, they run Domain Controllers , Exchange, Application Servers (ERP and SALES) and file servers mainly.  The enviroment aprox requires 2500 IOPS at 70%read and 30%write.