Cross-Platform Company Storage Architecture?

Eric^2 asks: "My company is preparing to implement a major network storage upgrade, and I'd like to get some ideas from Slashdot about what devices should be considered, and hopefully some experiences with some of the offerings that are available. What types of storage are you using and what would you recommend?"

"We are currently using approximately 2TB of storage space, and will need to expand to over 10TB in the next two to three years. We have a mix of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux clients and servers. All of our authentication is presently done through an Active Directory. If possible, we would like to centralize all of the storage into a single namespace, such as OpenAFS or DFS. Anything we purchase will have to be under maintenance contract for hardware such as failed drives or controllers. Ideally, whatever system we choose would allow us to purchase both high-speed SCSI spindles for our transactional needs and lower-speed SATA high capacity drives for our archival storage needs."

NetApp

[ZESTA]

Depends on what your budget is, but I would look into Network Appliance (http://www.netapp.com). Their systems are top notch, and have some very cool software features. They support NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel as connection methods.

-Randy

Venti

[DrSkwid]

Either through plan9 port or the real thing

Venti is block level and, as such, coalesces identical blocks, a bit like LZW, so backing up 100 Windows machines doesn't take up 100x the disk space of backing up 1 windows machine.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti.html [bell-labs.com]

http://cm.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/8/venti [bell-labs.com]

http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/venti.html [swtch.com]
http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/vbackup.html [swtch.com]

Sean Quinlan (one of the 2 Venti inventors) moved from Bell Labs by Google.

08:56-10:13
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MySQL r0x0rs

NetApp

[Anonymous Coward]

I would definitely recommend NetApp. We have both a Linux (Debian) and Windows environment and the NetApp works brilliant with both. We initially went with the FAS270 which can scale to 6TB directly or with the upgrade of the "head" I think you can go up to a few PB. It was the most cost effective and scaleable we could find and their support/response is much better than EMC. Builtin technology is fantastic and flexible and I know they have a tie-in module for cheaper archival, I think (not really sure on that part) it's called snapvault.

it depends...

[therus121]

You need to see how you want to access your storage, and what is going to be running on it, as to how you go:-

SAN - block level data access to storage. Good for databases; low client counts (because SAN ports are expensive relative to ethernet) - but with high IO demands. EMC are good, but pricey - a low to mid end Clariion would probably be the right range to aim at.

NAS - file level data access to storage. Good for situations where there are many clients connecting, and their IO demands are not excessive. Netapps filers are very good at this (if youy can find information on their new OS (10GX) then it's VERY interesting. ILM use them in their render farms.

iSCSI - a blend of the best of both, but it's still looked upon as an emerging technology. You get (or did) free iSCSI licenses with netapps filers.

O'Reilly have a good book on this. "Using SAN's and NAS" which is vendor agnostic http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/sansnas/index.html [oreilly.com]

Re:NetApp

[weaselprince]

The OP doesn't say much about the selection criteria - scalable? performant? manageable? cheap?

If it's cheap, then Netapp might not qualify... :)

What about technologies - NAS? Host-attached? Gateway/NAS? Grids?

Other companies/products to consider:

EMC [emc.com] (The Celerra is a nice product)

Onstor [onstor.com] Bobcat

HP [hp.com]

IBM [ibm.com]

Hitachi [hds.com]

Panasas [panasas.com]

Exanet [exanet.com]

Yotta Yotta [yottayotta.com]

StoreAge [storeage.com]

If you want basic raid devices look at Infortrend [infortrend.com]/Transtec [transtec.co.uk]. Their S-ATA offerings now support RAID-6 and are dirt cheap.

Re:it depends...

[TrueKonrads]

Don't forget that there is ATA-over-ethernet [linuxdevices.com] You can buy the 10 disk arrays make them RAID5 and offer as SAN solutions to linux machines with ease, without expensive fiber switches.

FreeNAS.org

[gurutc]

Free NAS Wireless, secure, open source, multi platform, easy to configure, etc etc etc. For free! I've used it. Compared to the LaCie network devices (not the USB LaCies, they're great) it is FASTER! But a dedicated Linux box you config yourself and with a tuned IP stack is quicker. However, for the effort of downloading a teensy ISO, burning a CD, and spending 5 minutes to install and config, this solution is really astounding. www.freenas.org

Re:NetApp

[Jim_Maryland]

In some cases, going cheap isn't always a good idea. A group that manages one of our labs decided to buy a device from Excel Meridian [excelmeridiandata.com] and in my opinion, it's a piece of junk. We found limitations that affect both a mixed OS environment as well as scalability (not in disk space but handling larger Active Directory structures). The Excel Meridian device we have has about 6 TB of storage so space isn't an issue but the ability to execute files on it from an NFS mount fails. We also find that it can't join a domain that has a large number of user entries (don't recall the exact number but want to say it's around 1000 users). For a small workgroup this might be fine but not for a larger corporation.

NetApp is by far my choice but if I need to get a cheaper device, Dell PowerVaults are generally adequate unless you are looking for highly transactional file activies (we've run into the file lock problem on the device occasionally if we process files, in our case image processing). To avoid the file lock though, we process locally on our UNIX boxes and transfer the results to the PowerVault. One limitation we find on the PowerVault (and likely it affects all MS Win32 based file systems) is case sensitivity. I believe you "can" change to allow differentiation of files based on case but Microsoft doesn't recommend it.