Low Cost storage with Array Replication

[chadwickking]

Alrighty, I hope this one gets some good replies. I have a friend of mine that is looking to begin his virtualization of his current server room. Now this isn't something fancy at all I think at most they may be virtualizing 15+ servers and they are wanting to be able to have things like DRS/HA and so forth. Now the big part of this is we are wanting to have some sort of Array Replication in the event of a DR. The storage they are going with is probably going to be software based iSCSI due to the reduce cost again. Now I have some experience with using Open Filer but from my research I have been unable to find out how well the Array Replication feature works or much less set it up. I have also worked with HP Lefthand but I am unsure of the cost with licensing and so forth. Having virtualized local storage would be the best for us to go in regards to budgeting and so forth. I was hoping for some feedback with recommendations and your experience with vairous storage solutions. Appreciate any feed back!

Regards,

Chad King

VCP

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[dquintana · Accepted solution]

Hello chadwickking,

Do you check falconstor solutions http://www.falconstor.com/ or Open-e ? http://www.open-e.com/

Maybe this products can help you.

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[eeg3]

It sounds like you aren't looking at only free options, but what kind of ball-park are you looking for? Different companies have different opinions of cheap.

StarWind isn't too pricey, but may be more than some would want to pay.

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[chadwickking]

correct - right now our client is looking to spend between 15-20k depending what the solution offers. Array replication would be a great benefit to have on the back end in the event of an failure.

[chadwickking]

I have had experience with Openfiler and lefthand but openfiler array replication doesnt seem very straight forward at all.

[vmroyale]

openfiler array replication doesnt seem very straight forward at all.

I'll second that!

Have you considered the Lefthand VSA running on the local storage?

[chadwickking]

Does anyone know of pricing for the HP lefthand VSA? I know we use it in our production environment in my job but never once looked into pricing 😕 .

I know that have a 30 day trial so I need to just get it downloaded and play with it some in my lab this week.

Cheers,

Chad King

VCP-410 | Server+

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[Josh26]

I would urge you to consider that when you start throwing in the hacked up nature of some of the lower cost technologies, you will find yourself more likely to see them breaking than a non-replicated, enterprise grade solution.

[hutchingsp]

Does anyone know of pricing for the HP lefthand VSA?

Around $5k per 10tb node license based on UK pricing.

[peterdabr]

Falconstor and Lefthand are rather pricey solution for someone wanting to spend very little on redundant storage solution.

If you want to go open-source route and have it competely for free, I recommend using open-source DRBD from Linbit as block-level storage replication coupled with SCST iscsi target for presenting LUNs to initiators.

Pros of DRBD:

-block-level replication; gets installed on most of Linux distributions; older, unused servers hardware can be converted to storage nodes; supports link aggregation as dedicated replication link between storage nodes; Active/Active support

Cons:

-requires some time invested to set it up right; rather complex

We have DRBD/SCST-based storage for some of our ESX 4.x clusters, using 8-bay/24-baySupermicro servers filled up with disks in raid10 and having the LUNs presented using either iscsi or infiniband in Active/Active configuration. As I said, it is rather complex configuration but time invested in learing this is well worth it.

Peter D.

[ChrisDearden]

We recently purchased some HP MSA P2000's for our Backup Storage Tier - it supposrts a block level replication over iscsi ( in addition to the FC interface to the hosts ) - I think it worked out at aroudn 15k , but you got a lot of storage for that.

[savantsingh]

I see a lot of solutions have been recommended... but i have some other questions:

Where is your DR site... i mean how far and whats the bandwidth requirment..?

Would be using SRM?

How much storage do you need and do you need tiering for applications??

Do you currently have a GB ethernet network for iscsi options..???

If its a production environment which i am guessing it is as you talk about DR i would not go with a Freebie option as getting support on those products is tough..

There are many options in the market and as far as clustering features from VMware they would be able to provide you somewhat similar features, but before deciding on a solution/product you need to keep existing infrastructure and requirment in mind.

Hope this helps... i can help you narrow down to a product if more requirments are defined.

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[chadwickking]

The most this site will need is 2 TB of Data - The DR will be Local as well. They dont have very many servers to virtualize but would like adequate room to grow after the initial Virtualization. They also plan on provisioning additional VM's after their current environment is virtualized as well depending on how things look - i.e. resource consompution - host capacity. Currently looking at the estimates they won't even be close to capacity. They want to be able to satisfy one host failure and still be able to function but they also want the storage to be replicated in some way in the event of it going offline. This doesn't need to be SRM as they are looking for a low cost solution. They would be okay with some downtime even if that involves up to an hour due to storage but couldn't really take more than that. I hope this helps...

--

Cheers,

Chadwick J. King

VCP - 410 | Comptia Server+

Twitter:@cwjking

[savantsingh]

So its a relatively small environment... if the DR site is local i think HA would take care of the host failures using the same VC.

For storage any small/mid tier iscsi storage option would give you mirroring or remote cloning option.

But for the storage requirments you have i think openfiler would be a good option i have configured it myself and the replication works fine. You can also buy the products support which gives you peace of mind.With one hour's RTO this can easily be failed over. Existing hardware can be used for building the solution.

On a seprate note:

The reason i am suggesting openfiler over any VSA let it be HP, EMC etc is the cost. But if your company has the budget i would suggest to buy hardware SAN . For this i would recommend to go for Equalogic as its quite cheap and for Local DR it works fine.

Hope this helps

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[gifo]

Chad, our company is living in a very similar environment, a handful of VMs, iSCSI storage, low budget. after months of research and testing, I decided to go the Falconstor CDP path. your friend would need to do a lot of internal analysis - i was wanting active-active replication, CDP, good failback ability (easy to failover, but to resume order is another), not a lot of transactional processing, etc. i also identified the data i needed to protect in real time vs the data that just needed to be sent over to sit somewhere else. also looked at every cloud server/storage provider and colo, but we chose capex over opex for DR. because iSCSI is involved, there will need to be quite a bit of attention to the network also. Veeam was another excellent option for an active-passive setup.