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…

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.

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).

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.

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.

What kind of prices are people seeing for a PS100E?

http://www.equallogic.com/products/view.aspx?id=48

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?

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!

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.

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.