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[CGotzmann]

Which softwares provide with "single pane" management of the SAN's (based on commodity hardware)?

[signal_lost]

Originally Posted by CGotzmann

Which softwares provide with "single pane" management of the SAN's (based on commodity hardware)?

Storage virtualization is really want you want

Datacore. It will "Virtualize" all your storage systems (iSCSI, local disks, or FC) allow thin provisioning, replication between subsystems, caching, and replication and then allow for centralized provisioning, and performance monitoring. Its massively cheaper to add a datacore box in front of your SANs to add these features than to buy them from your vendor and spend thousands on a 4gig stick of ram to expand your cache. It can be configured for redundancy, and will allow you to add features like replication at a big discount over SAN vendors.

If your just wanting single pane monitoring, and reporting for storage TekTools Profiler (Now Soler winds) is nice.

HDS also makes some nice storage virtualization products, but you saying commodity hardware makes me think they are out of your budget.

- Disclaimer, I work for a DataCore partner, feel free to PM me for quotes, questions, and angry rants.

[FHDave]

Chris, I am not sure what you are asking ...

[CGotzmann]

Originally Posted by signal_lost

Storage virtualization is really want you want

Datacore. It will "Virtualize" all your storage systems (iSCSI, local disks, or FC) allow thin provisioning, replication between subsystems, caching, and replication and then allow for centralized provisioning, and performance monitoring. Its massively cheaper to add a datacore box in front of your SANs to add these features than to buy them from your vendor and spend thousands on a 4gig stick of ram to expand your cache. It can be configured for redundancy, and will allow you to add features like replication at a big discount over SAN vendors.

If your just wanting single pane monitoring, and reporting for storage TekTools Profiler (Now Soler winds) is nice.

HDS also makes some nice storage virtualization products, but you saying commodity hardware makes me think they are out of your budget.

- Disclaimer, I work for a DataCore partner, feel free to PM me for quotes, questions, and angry rants.

I'm of course building something for this WHT market, so I cannot spend too much otherwise the monthly costs will reflect the investment in making it work...
Thus, I need to use commodity hardware (building my own hardware SAN's) but need the operational software to manage that storage.

I was thinking Open-E, but I read a few scary complaints about it just now.
I also am not sure if it has "single pane" management of the SAN devices.

Another requirement is that it must support active-active SANs and have good IOP performance.


I see a lot of discussion about all these software's here and some people keep saying "then I guess you dont care about single pane management" etc etc... but no one has yet to actually recommend a software that DOES HAVE single pane management, active-active, and is affordable.

[signal_lost]

Originally Posted by CGotzmann

I'm of course building something for this WHT market, so I cannot spend too much otherwise the monthly costs will reflect the investment in making it work...
Thus, I need to use commodity hardware (building my own hardware SAN's) but need the operational software to manage that storage.

I was thinking Open-E, but I read a few scary complaints about it just now.
I also am not sure if it has "single pane" management of the SAN devices.

Another requirement is that it must support active-active SANs and have good IOP performance.


I see a lot of discussion about all these software's here and some people keep saying "then I guess you dont care about single pane management" etc etc... but no one has yet to actually recommend a software that DOES HAVE single pane management, active-active, and is affordable.

Unless your a giant Enterprise single pane management is overrated.
In that Case Grab whatever ZFS flavor of the month you want to use and make sure to do snapshots, and backups of the files to another location. Its funny how people try to push Enterprise features like single pane management on people who's scale dosn't need it. I'm personally used to setting up thin provisioning carving out some massive LUNs for my Vmware servers Datastores and only bothering to look at the SAN if/when i'm starting to need more space or have a problem with storage performance (SAN management is one of the least accessed things on the planet, in a small to medium setup). Something like Datacore might provide some value for the ease of doing snapshots, replication and caching but given your needs it still might be outa budget.

[jayglate]

Personally I never liked the fact that Datacore ran on windows and from when we demo'd it was very difficult to use and was clunky and just a pain in the but to deal with. Not to mention it is obnoxiously expensive. Just my two cents.

[Jacob1]

Btw, they are planning to have a mjor new release in January and having been in the beta program it has revamped the interface completely. Not sure on price issue since not my area.

[signal_lost]

Originally Posted by jayglate

Personally I never liked the fact that Datacore ran on windows and from when we demo'd it was very difficult to use and was clunky and just a pain in the but to deal with. Not to mention it is obnoxiously expensive. Just my two cents.

The windows is so they don't have to write custom drivers, and NIC/HBA drivers for windows from qlogic and everyone are rock solid. EMC used to use windows XP embedded for their clarions, you'd be quite confused how many Enterprise storage platforms are just windows re-branded (Compellant NAS front end is Windows Storage Server).

They also have a pretty decent best practices that has it setup like an appliance (don't even think about joining it to your domain).

I'll agree the interface isn't 3Par, but the new version is supposed to fix it, and if your complaining about the interface and price I'm assuming you've never worked with EMC (4x the cost) HDS (Having to make your own txt config files to manage snapshots) or Fujitsu (REALLY bad translation, and a bug recently that if you tried to set the language to anything other than engrish, or Japanese the SAN would go into endless reboots).
http://ts.fujitsu.com/campaigns/myfirstsan/

Datacore gets confused with being a "cheap" software SAN solution when really they are a Enterprise SAN controller that CAN be used to create a reasonably priced SAN.

[lostmind]

Originally Posted by signal_lost

The windows is so they don't have to write custom drivers, and NIC/HBA drivers for windows from qlogic and everyone are rock solid. EMC used to use windows XP embedded for their clarions, you'd be quite confused how many Enterprise storage platforms are just windows re-branded (Compellant NAS front end is Windows Storage Server).

They also have a pretty decent best practices that has it setup like an appliance (don't even think about joining it to your domain).

I'll agree the interface isn't 3Par, but the new version is supposed to fix it, and if your complaining about the interface and price I'm assuming you've never worked with EMC (4x the cost) HDS (Having to make your own txt config files to manage snapshots) or Fujitsu (REALLY bad translation, and a bug recently that if you tried to set the language to anything other than engrish, or Japanese the SAN would go into endless reboots).
http://ts.fujitsu.com/campaigns/myfirstsan/

Datacore gets confused with being a "cheap" software SAN solution when really they are a Enterprise SAN controller that CAN be used to create a reasonably priced SAN.

I'm another one of those guys who wasn't happy with the fact that it's a windows product. I don't think Bonnie was too happy about that. Add in the pricing and I couldn't see the purpose of this product at all.

[sailor]

HP lefthand VSA

[Coolraul]

Originally Posted by jayglate

Personally I never liked the fact that Datacore ran on windows and from when we demo'd it was very difficult to use and was clunky and just a pain in the but to deal with. Not to mention it is obnoxiously expensive. Just my two cents.

Just curious, what is the problem with the OS it runs on? As long as it works...

[jayglate]

Originally Posted by Coolraul

Just curious, what is the problem with the OS it runs on? As long as it works...

Well, besides the fact that it didn't really work well. LOL I never liked my SAN running on windows.

[signal_lost]

Originally Posted by jayglate

Well, besides the fact that it didn't really work well. LOL I never liked my SAN running on windows.

See I have the opposite experience, I've seen Split Brains on Linux, and BSD based systems and I've seen Datacore "Just f'ing work". That said I love Linux, but storage systems are only as good as the smuck who set them up, and Linux requires a smarter smuck but is often chosen by people who are cheap both in their storage system, and in paying the smuck who manages it.

(I've seen 60 TB destroyed by human error, and 1/4 million dollar SANs perform poorly, given a sufficiently dumb smuck.)

[CGotzmann]

How about Starwind?
I'm leaning towards them right now, and I like their active-active load balanced method and failback fast sync