Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)
lohelle wrote:I used Open-E a few years ago. It worked "ok" most of the time, but performance was not perfect. But the biggest problem was that it was a "closed product" where troubleshooting was difficult.
I tried Starwind a few years ago, and it worked great. But we still went for a "hardware solution" from Infortrend.
I wanted HA/replication a while ago, and the active-active SAN solution from Starwind made it possible to do in a fraction of the cost of most other solutions, with more features than most other producs provide.
The possibility to use "off the shelf" hardware (mostly Supermicro) with "off the shelf" harddrives is very nice. We currently have two nodes, one with SSD (single drives as luns) and one with a large SAS-array. This gives ut SSD performance with full failover to the secondary SAN.
Using such software on top of Windows is not ALWAYS the best solution, but it makes it MUCH easier to troubleshoot and find stable drivers.
Now we just need ZFS for Windows.
lohelle wrote:Good! ALUA would be GREAT. When will this be available? Version 6 ?
EQL is nice but has own issues (unusable snapshots for example).robnicholson wrote:For us it was the blend of features, performance and cost with the later been the clincher esp. when you gave us two licenses for one. The personal thing I love about it is the "no-limits" capacity. If we temporarily need 12TB of storage, we can connect a SATA-3 array easily and for little money.
Overall, reliability & performance have to be up there with the hardware solutions. The downside of being able to use your own hardware was that you have to be careful what you buy. We bought a real dodo of an HP SmartArray controller which caused all sorts of problems in the early days (StarWind crashing due to the controller going bad) but since we replaced that with an LSI Logic card, it's been rock solid.
We do occasionally get slow downs compared to before but that's kind of expected with any SAN solution. You just can't expect to take six servers all with high speed local SAS storage and switch them to shared storage and expect the same performance as before. But aside from these very occasional slow downs, performance is perfectly fine. Not helped by me setting the cache size to the default on our main file server when we've got 16GB of RAM in there.
Ohh, and don't bother with a really high power CPU configuration. We bought a dual AMD six-core system (so 12 cores in total) and 11 of them are just sat there parked most of the time.
But unfortunately, we're looking at replacing StarWind with Equalogic for our primary because "nobody got fired for buying Equalogic" and our parent company is unfamilar with software SAN and thefore wary. But we're keeping it for our secondary SAN as it's just so good.
Cheers, Rob.
It would put me off. It smacks of "ohh you're using more storage but it's effectively the same box/work/software for us but we'll charge you more anyway". The flexibility of just stucking in some temporary JBOD is welcomed.What do you think about licensing policy when you'll be charged for data capacity only? So number of nodes actually handling data would be up to you?
Maybe some recommended/testing hardware configurations? All we're mainly talking about here is the server, disk controller & network cards. Maybe some memory sizing recommendations as I notice that deduplication requires a lot more memory.Do you think there's some way to go? Using OEMs / selling to integrators only? Automatic verification tool? Anything else?
It really does stick in my throught to have to consider non-Starwind as it's working fine, is incredibly cost effective and is gaining more and more neat features each version.Well, I've heard it about IBM actually EQL is nice but has own issues (unusable snapshots for example).
