Need advice about 96TB RAID storage

[David Kuhn]

I'm a big EMC fan... but you're not going to get 170TB for $10k. I think my smallest EMC unit is 12TB and that was almost $20k (a couple years ago). I've got cheaper hardware for some uses (50TB Thecus rackmount array for instance - $6k iirc) but it's basically for low value data backup and not set up for fast performance. The way I think about it... if what I'm putting into the array is worth a lot of money (or would cost a lot to reproduce)... it's worth spending the money to get the hardware from an enterprise vendor.

But I understand and feel for the folks who are cost conscious... in which case I'd go with cheaper hardware but more redundancy.

 

[Neil W. Smith]

Cost-effective SANS ...

Cost-effective SANS ...

Yeah I get what your saying but my point was that wasn't really a bargain is all.

I actually was calculating for more than 6k of drives but with expanders and stuff you can run all that off a single raid controller and there is not a need for two $900 controllers and I typically use Areca. You could run it off a $600 areca controller instead of two $900 LSI controllers. Also even with the stuff you mentioned you said $100 for chassis and fans when alt he parts you listed so far was only around $8k. I was going by a $10k budget.

I get that building your own machine is not for everyone. I am somewhat of a raid/storage expert so its not really an issue in my case.

The company I work for is all about storage actually. Its about the support/development of an open source/clustered file-system than the founder of the company created.

I have just seen a lot of DAS/SAN/NAS systems that are a lot cheaper than 48TB for $10k and disagree about how much of a bang for your buck that is.

Thanks for the clarification ... so, not including your own 'roll your own 176 TBs for $10K' solution, could you just provide some examples of commercially available 48 TB 1300 MB/s to the desktop RAID arrays with a five year warranty on parts that can be incorporated into a shared SAN topology that does offer the kind of 'bang for buck' you're looking for ... I'm not talking about DAS or NAS solutions but a robust SAN set-up for a multi-client environment running Xsan which is what my initial posting was all about.

Genuinely interested in hearing your suggestions for alternative cost-effective SAN storage solutions ... models numbers, price and performance levels would be useful.

Thanks,
Neil

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

(snip) I actually was calculating for more than 6k of drives but with expanders and stuff you can run all that off a single raid controller and there is not a need for two $900 controllers and I typically use Areca. You could run it off a $600 areca controller instead of two $900 LSI controllers. (snip)

What single Areca controller can exceed 900MB/s? Every system I have ever specced for 4K 10bit log DPX playout, 1.2GB/s, requires dual controllers. I've also had two Areca controllers fail on me in the last 3 years - not that one can necessarily extrapolate from one person's experience.

What would rock is a chassis with an onboard controller and 8 SSDs direct to PCIe2 that could do 1200MB/s R/W as DAS. But that seems like a different thread - Tom's looking for workgroup solutions.

Cheers - #19

 

[houkouonchi]

What single Areca controller can exceed 900MB/s? Every system I have ever specced for 4K 10bit log DPX playout, 1.2GB/s, requires dual controllers. I've also had two Areca controllers fail on me in the last 3 years - not that one can necessarily extrapolate from one person's experience.

What would rock is a chassis with an onboard controller and 8 SSDs direct to PCIe2 that could do 1200MB/s R/W as DAS. But that seems like a different thread - Tom's looking for workgroup solutions.

Cheers - #19

An ARC 1880 can do around 2 GB/sec read and 1.1 GB/sec write.
An ARC-1882 (old revision, PCI-E 2.0) can do around 2.2 GB/sec read 2 GB/sec write
An ARC-1882 (new revision, PCI-E 3.0) can do around 3 GB/sec read and 3 GB/sec write.

This is of course assuming you have enough disks.

Honestly no where I worked really bought fully deployed sans with everything except some netapp stuff for mail (which I will agree it is expensive). I would have to probably look around a bit for your requirements.