I am the new IT guy where I work (just started Monday the 21st), and a lot of stuff is done in a way that makes me scratch my head. One of these is the fact that all ESXi hosts use local storage only. I am leery of building my own storage solution for a business so I'm looking at commercial NASes. While I would love Synology devices, I don't think I will be able to get approval due to the cost. Does anyone have experience with SansDigital NASes? Or any other decent inexpensive solutions? Only requirements I have are it must support NFS & it would be nice if it could also do SMB w/ Active Directory integration, rack mount & can be upgraded to 10GbE.
SansDigital NASes?
- Thread starter smccloud
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Current speed is attached. I would like it to be at least as fast on the VM side when it comes to random performance, I know it won't match sequential without 10GbE. I did forget one requirement, I would like the ability to replicate between systems as part of my yet to be fully designed disaster recovery system.
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those random numbers aren't too impressive, any SSD raid 1 can hit that if your performance requirments aren't huge, build your own with a limited budget is probably your best choice
edit, meant mirror not stripe for raid level
edit, meant mirror not stripe for raid level
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I've had issues with freenas but that's just on my personal bias, windows server 2012 R2 could certainly manage this with a tiered storage space depending on your size requirements
Well, I have been told the network has been operating under the "spare no expense as long as its cheap or free" model. I use FreeNAS at home and I have joined it to an AD & managed shares from a Windows box before.
Is 2u required? unless you need a lot of drives that may be overkill 4x2tb in raid 10 would beat your random numbers there without going SSD and would leave you with 4tb of space in 1u and 2tb enterprise drives are in the great deals section as refurbs or white labels pretty often, at that point you could get away with "junk" for hardware something like a dell PE1950 III would manage and those are dirt cheap on ebay, hell here's one with 2x2tb drives already it just needs 2 more
DELL POWEREDGE 1950 III 2x Quad Core 3.0 + 32GB RAM, 2 x 2TB SATA. WTY
DELL POWEREDGE 1950 III 2x Quad Core 3.0 + 32GB RAM, 2 x 2TB SATA. WTY
or a unit like this... hell that has a LTO3 tape drive for backups included, not sure of FreeNAS knows what to do with one though
Dell Poweredge 2900 2x Xeon E5405 2.00GHz Quad Core 48GB DDR2 4x1TB 7200RPM Sata
Dell Poweredge 2900 2x Xeon E5405 2.00GHz Quad Core 48GB DDR2 4x1TB 7200RPM Sata
I would like new and not used hardware. Playing around on Amazon, I priced out a Synology RS2416RP+, rail kit, 2 Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSDs, 10 WD RE4 2TB drives & a RAM upgrade for it for around $3800. I do know that sometime this summer I will get the go ahead to buy a new ESXi host for the production systems, so then I could probably use one of the old systems as a NAS for the lab. Argh, no clue what to do and it doesn't help that I don't really have a budget that I know of.
we can't do more than guess if you don't have requimrents, 10x2tb is a lot of drives but only 20tb raw, half that in a raid 10 more in 5/6 though. You might get better bang for your buck with larger drives with ssd's serving as a performance layer and you will get more per $ on older hardware(the PE1950/2900 are at the edge of usable though I can understand wanting to avoid them)
you may have good luck at the dell/lenovo outlet on scratch and dent/refurbished models if you're more comfortable with something like that though.
Well, I have my requirements. However, I'm sure the main one I'm given is as cheap as possible. I mean, we still have 10/100 switches in use and have a single managed switch
