Hi, my first post, let's get right to it:
Our small 250-500 seat non-profit has a simple ESXi 5.1 HA-setup which runs two ESXi hosts and a SAS storage unit, the HP MSA P2000 G3. When I started here, as a junior, this setup was just a few months old. It had half of the single shelf filled with twelve 10K rpm 300GB SAS drives (from HP) in RAID6 with two spares.
Let's move a few years into the future and our storage is over 90% used. I'm thinking about the following options:
a) commercial SSDs
b) enterprise SSDs
c) more enterprise HDDs
Goal: 1-2TB more storage, preferably faster storage, non-production reliable
Situation: since we're a non-profit, budgets are tight but not impossible. We are also not a production facility, time isn't money, but when something fails people get annoyed and frustrated. So we're still aiming for keeping everything running during office hours but if something fails, they know it's a budget issue, not an IT issue.
We are having about 100-150 people active at any time during office hours on our few Remote Desktop servers, we run Exchange, fileserver, internal webserver. I feel the storage we have now is adequate but it could certainly benefit from the speed of solid-state storage. Our P2000 G3 has dual controllers, redundant power supply (+ lines), each controller is connected to each host for redundancy.
Research: the P2000 G3 doesn't officially support SSDs, although I've read good experiences with people that do. Still, does someone have experience with this ?
Reliable consumer SSDs like the Crucial MX-series and Samsung Pro-series seems like a good choice price-wise.
Enterprise SSDs like the already low-budget Toshiba PX03SNF series are about 4 times more expensive, but dual-port SAS seems quite the feature to have when we have dual-controllers. The 6 times higher DWPD factor seems very appealing too. Maybe the SATA Intel DC S3610 is an option, floating in between the price ranges with massive write endurance.
Or should we just shut up and fill the 12 remaining slots with 10K rpm HDDs and call it a day ?
I've read RAID6 on the P2000 G3 is not a good idea. The issue is this is our only main storage, I can't just change this. So we have to live with this. So my idea was to go for a decent RAID10 setup, move most servers (except mass-storage) over so this problem is tackled.
Our small 250-500 seat non-profit has a simple ESXi 5.1 HA-setup which runs two ESXi hosts and a SAS storage unit, the HP MSA P2000 G3. When I started here, as a junior, this setup was just a few months old. It had half of the single shelf filled with twelve 10K rpm 300GB SAS drives (from HP) in RAID6 with two spares.
Let's move a few years into the future and our storage is over 90% used. I'm thinking about the following options:
a) commercial SSDs
b) enterprise SSDs
c) more enterprise HDDs
Goal: 1-2TB more storage, preferably faster storage, non-production reliable
Situation: since we're a non-profit, budgets are tight but not impossible. We are also not a production facility, time isn't money, but when something fails people get annoyed and frustrated. So we're still aiming for keeping everything running during office hours but if something fails, they know it's a budget issue, not an IT issue.
We are having about 100-150 people active at any time during office hours on our few Remote Desktop servers, we run Exchange, fileserver, internal webserver. I feel the storage we have now is adequate but it could certainly benefit from the speed of solid-state storage. Our P2000 G3 has dual controllers, redundant power supply (+ lines), each controller is connected to each host for redundancy.
Research: the P2000 G3 doesn't officially support SSDs, although I've read good experiences with people that do. Still, does someone have experience with this ?
Reliable consumer SSDs like the Crucial MX-series and Samsung Pro-series seems like a good choice price-wise.
Enterprise SSDs like the already low-budget Toshiba PX03SNF series are about 4 times more expensive, but dual-port SAS seems quite the feature to have when we have dual-controllers. The 6 times higher DWPD factor seems very appealing too. Maybe the SATA Intel DC S3610 is an option, floating in between the price ranges with massive write endurance.
Or should we just shut up and fill the 12 remaining slots with 10K rpm HDDs and call it a day ?
I've read RAID6 on the P2000 G3 is not a good idea. The issue is this is our only main storage, I can't just change this. So we have to live with this. So my idea was to go for a decent RAID10 setup, move most servers (except mass-storage) over so this problem is tackled.
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