VMUNIX Blues

by Mark Mayo

1. Scott Lowe March 9th, 2007
   6:22 GMT

   There does seem to be a huge gap between NetApp’s FAS200 series and the FAS3000 series. Many customers are too big for the FAS200, but can’t afford the price tag of the FAS3000, and it seems like NetApp isn’t doing anything to address this market segment. They need something like a FAS1000 that sits between these two platforms both in capacity and in price.
2. Fazal Majid March 9th, 2007
   7:13 GMT

   We are getting quotes for my company’s internal IT storage. We’ve saturated our XServe RAID and are probably going for an iSCSI StoreVault (still small enough to qualify, I guess), as the costs of FC are getting hard to justify.

   Have you considered EqualLogic? They’re beyond my budget, but certified for Solaris. Otherwise, Thumpers would seem the way to go, but Sun has removed the entry-level $32K model from its catalog (apparently EDU customers can still get it), and the larger $60K is too expensive for us.
3. adb March 9th, 2007
   7:59 GMT

   You waved the price of a StoreVault in their faces and they wouldn’t take your money because you weren’t the sort of customer they imagined they wanted? What kind of salesmen were they?!? If anything, you grow your market by being interested in new and innovative uses of your product; if it’s good for things you never imagined then you might just have a great product.
4. Tom March 9th, 2007
   9:07 GMT

   Well, the FAS900 is still available. It seems to sit beneath the FAS3000 product.

   I’ve actually been looking at the NetApp product lines recently, looking for an NFS or perhaps an iSCSI solution. The folks where I work, want to run GFS over iSCSI, which scares me. But I’ve been looking at used FAS840 clusters. There are lots available right now.

   I guess a lot of people are going to build their own iSCSI solutions, with varying levels of success. http://www.openfiler.com is out there of course. When Solaris 10 U4 comes out, it should have include iSCSI target. I believe it is already in OpenSolaris.
5. mark March 10th, 2007
   16:12 GMT

   This piece probably should have been titled “Are the network storage vendors facing the innovator’s dilemna?”. Really I was just using NetApp as the example, since I’m more familiar with NetApp than any of their competitors.

   adb: So what happened was that our existing VARs were already selling NetApp, and they aren’t allowed to sell StoreVault. To buy StoreVault, we have to go with other VARs who do not sell “normal” filers. I guess NetApp is worried about the StoreVault cannibalizing their current accounts or pissing off their current resellers because of the lower margins or something. Odd situation. If the sales channel is intentionally gimped, it makes you wonder what else in the StoreVault is. We have a demo unit coming next week so we’ll find out soon enough.

   Fazal: We’re in a sort of similar situation where the Thumpers are just “too big”. Too much risk with that much storage capacity in a non-redundant config for this particular application. There’s also some concern with the “production readiness” of Sun’s iSCSI target right now… We’ve looked at EqualLogic, but honestly their pricing puts them right up in the FAS3000 range, just like Isilon, 3par, etc.

   Tom: You hit the nail on the head with “I guess a lot of people are going to build their own iSCSI solutions”. And really this is the crux of my post. If I were one of the current network storage darlings, I’d be pretty damned concerned about just how many people are slapping together “home grown” DRBD/GNBD and/or iSCSI solutions with GFS/OCFS2 (or not). The price differential is so extreme that people are deciding to “build it themselves” anyways knowing full well that they’re really just building unsupported one-off versions of technology they’d much rather just be buying from NetApp, Isilon, etc… Give it enough time, and they could find themselves on the wrong side of an entire market of “one off” redundant storage solutions!
6. Tom March 12th, 2007
   16:41 GMT

   On the iSCSI front: it seems damn hard to find an iSCSI array that has redundant controllers. The StoreVault stuff looks good, but still has a single controller.

   I don’t really know how people are deploying iSCSI right now. I’ve inherited an iSCSI project, and it is bit of mess. Since most iSCSI arrays are not fully redundant, I might just end up mirroring two iSCSI targets on separate arrays. The storage overhead is pretty high (RAID1), and I would would much prefer an integrated active/redundant controller so, I could do RAID6/RAID5-DP.

   I would suspect that the market is lacking a mid-market leader. Most of the products are packed with features, that drive up the cost. If there was a pure iSCSI product (no NAS features), with dual-controllers, SATA disks, and RAID6 support, I’m sure it would kill in this space. I’ve got too much to do, than worry about storage. It’s got to simple and reliable.

   I don’t know why NetApp or EMC haven’t seen this yet. NetApp is putting full NAS functions (CIFS and NFS) in StoreVault. Wouldn’t these boxes be much cheaper, if they were iSCSI-only?
7. Tom March 12th, 2007
   16:57 GMT

   I’ve looked at the EqualLogic PS100E, and I can’t see why it should cost as much as a StoreVault, as it is iSCSI-only, so the software should be really simple.

   What kind of prices are people seeing for a PS100E?

   http://www.equallogic.com/products/view.aspx?id=48
8. Heath Muchmore March 19th, 2007
   6:08 GMT

   As an employee of Equallogic and somewhat frequent reader of this blog, I can tell you that a PS100E has a list price of around $35K. And it will surely beat a 3020 in performance as I have gone head to head with the 3020 before and it was not even a close call in all aspects of performance. I personally have a customer running a 30,000 user exchange environment on my product and also have a 28 Node Redhat Cluster running GFS, I also have,strange as it is, a Solaris customer running DB2! OS Support: Windows 2k, 2k3, XP, Solaris, Linux, Aix, Hpux, Novell Netware, and even apple.
9. Barry Niederman March 26th, 2007
   13:05 GMT

   Interesting post Mark. I’m looking forward to seeing what you find in your analysis of NetApp FAS & StoreVault feature differences.

   Heath - please try not to embarrass yourself or EqualLogic with your unfounded performance claims. A PS100E (while a fine box for the price) is nowhere near the class of a FAS3020 from a performance, resiliency or flexibility perspective.

   We’ve benchmarked both these boxes (among others) so we know what we’re talking about. Show us proof, or cut the FUD.
10. Ignacio Torres April 3rd, 2007
    6:51 GMT

    Heath - Is that a joke? $35K for 3.5TB?

    An all redundant X.San solution from apple is $36K for 21TB.

    I haven’t tried EqualLogic or Apple’s solutions (I’m an EMC & HP boy at work).

    I tried openfiler and didn’t like the iScsi implementation at all.
    I have to check the Solaris implementation, zfs + iscsitadm seems quite straightforward.
11. Tom April 11th, 2007
    23:08 GMT

    Well, the XRaid isn’t fully redundant out of the box, as the controllers don’t support disk failover (half disks connect to one controller, and half to the other). So I hope your solution includes a second XRaid, and your mirror them together (or 3+ in a RAID5). it is really cheap, so get a lot of them.

    XSan is a funky cluster filesystem. It is hard to do a clustered filesystem that doesn’t suck. Hopefully, it is better than GFS.

    The EqualLogic is not really comparable, since it a SAN array box, not a direct attach box like the XRAID. It has actual redundant controllers, cluster support (multiple EqualLogic units appear like a single unit), snapshots, replication, etc. You can even do transparent (hitless) migration of volumes between EqualLogic units. Logical disks can span arrays. Logical disks can contain RAID5 and RAID10 storage, and “hot” chunks of the disk can be automatically migrated to the RAID10, while cold areas can be migrated to the RAID5. It supports “thin provisioning”, so you can create logical disks bigger than available storage, and storage is grabbed as your right to it (useful if you have 20 servers that you want to give 100GB each, but you don’t know which server needs what exactly).
12. Tom April 11th, 2007
    23:13 GMT

    Anyways, I guess OpenFiler is going to be toast now that OpenSolaris gets these bits:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/sun_fish_food/

    And it will be interesting what the hardware looks like.

    iSCSI isn’t really that hard. But NAS requires years of optimization to get right. And Solaris has that.
13. the occasional blog June 12th, 2007
    12:32 GMT

    All the A-SIS talk

    There is quite a bit of chatter about de-duplication methods and technologies now-a-days, mostly sparked by NetApp’s announcement of data de-duplication facilities on their storage systems. De-duplication has been a buzzword that’s been aro…

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