FC SAN? Or FreeNAS?

[kjnicoletti]

I have worked as a network engineer at medium sized health care companies (700-7000 employees) for over 20 years now. I have administered SANs from HP, Dell, NetApp, and EMC as well as NASes from Dell, Buffalo, HP, FalconStor and Synology. At home I have a FreeNAS for storage and Plex.

Here's my two cents FWIW to you:

Buy a real SAN with redundant controllers. Don't try to make your own SAN out of FreeNAS if the VM guests you will run are production and critical to your company.

Edit: a real SAN with redundant controllers AND support. And keep paying for the support for the life of the SAN :) Oh and dedupe has no place in a performance SAN. Dedupe is a feature you want on your NAS you send your backups to, not your SAN.

iSCSI can save you a few dollars in a new SAN purchase, but a dedicated FC fabric is going to be better performance.

I keep stressing performance since you spoke of MSSQL. But really, it all depends on how you are using SQL - a lightly used SQL server can get by with just about anything, but a heavily hit SQL server has to be well architected.

 

[diehard]

My advice would be to analyze your situation and decide what you need.

Good luck getting an AFA with redundant controllers anywhere in the same universe of price of what you have planned here.

I believe 3Par or Compellent's cheapest ones are still over $20k.

 

[jgreco]

That's pretty much a dated strategy that the legacy SAN vendors would love you to follow, but everyone knows it is a tired strategy and that software based devices are going to eventually decimate the SAN.

We used to rely on mainframes for computing and SAN for storage. They both still work, but the new paradigms have so many benefits.

 

[kjnicoletti]

That's pretty much a dated strategy that the legacy SAN vendors would love you to follow, but everyone knows it is a tired strategy and that software based devices are going to eventually decimate the SAN.

We used to rely on mainframes for computing and SAN for storage. They both still work, but the new paradigms have so many benefits.

By saying that software SANs will eventually overtake traditional SANs you are acknowledging the notion that traditional SANs are still the majority. Not to mention that a software based SAN is still a SAN, FreeNAS is a NAS package. Maybe if there was a "FreeSAN" package this discussion would be different.

And one last piece - Enterprise environments move a lot slower than the hardcore gaming market or general purpose PC sales. Reliability is much more important to a business than being on the bleeding edge. So absent a driving factor, why would any business want to bleed? In this case, the incentive would be keeping cost down (maybe? we really don't know what from the OP). I stand by my statement - in this example, FreeNAS would certainly help keep the cost down, but for a business SAN I argue it isn't worth the risk.

 

[Mirfster]

Maybe if there was a "FreeSAN" package this discussion would be different.

Psst... TrueNas...

 

[Mlovelace]

I have worked as a network engineer at medium sized health care companies (700-7000 employees) for over 20 years now. I have administered SANs from HP, Dell, NetApp, and EMC as well as NASes from Dell, Buffalo, HP, FalconStor and Synology. At home I have a FreeNAS for storage and Plex.

Here's my two cents FWIW to you:

Buy a real SAN with redundant controllers. Don't try to make your own SAN out of FreeNAS if the VM guests you will run are production and critical to your company.

Edit: a real SAN with redundant controllers AND support. And keep paying for the support for the life of the SAN :) Oh and dedupe has no place in a performance SAN. Dedupe is a feature you want on your NAS you send your backups to, not your SAN.

iSCSI can save you a few dollars in a new SAN purchase, but a dedicated FC fabric is going to be better performance.

I keep stressing performance since you spoke of MSSQL. But really, it all depends on how you are using SQL - a lightly used SQL server can get by with just about anything, but a heavily hit SQL server has to be well architected.

I agree redundant controllers and 24hr support are a must, dedupe is meh, compression is where it's at these days. FC being faster then a proper dedicated iSCSI network is a joke, if it weren't then FC wouldn't be dying like it is. SDS is the way the industry is going, look at the clustering you can do with RHEL/CEPH. Dell wouldn't have partnered with Nexenta if they thought their SANs would beat them out in a few years.

 

[diehard]

The line between NAS and SAN is hardly there anymore anyway.. vendors will still sell iSCSI boxes as a "SAN" which is exactly what you can do with FreeNAS.

 

[kjnicoletti]

There's a lot of very strong opinions being thrown around here... You know what they say about opinions :)

I stand by my opinion. Working as a SAN admin isn't sexy - you aren't always using the latest tech. When you start sharing storage for multiple mission-critical servers, and any downtime costs the business millions your priority is reliability. Proven, reliable solutions win out every time.

Dell wouldn't have partnered with Nexenta if they thought their SANs would beat them out in a few years.

I'm curious where the Dell purchase of EMC factors into this logic?

The line between NAS and SAN is hardly there anymore anyway

One of the key distinctions between SAN and NAS has traditionally been redundancy and availability - the exact point I have been trying to make in this thread :) But the real difference is how you access them - if you are using SMB or NFS it's a NAS; iSCSI or FC is a SAN. So in that sense, yes I agree - the line is blurring. Many SANs offer SMB access and many NASes offer iSCSI. But I think it's still important to distinguish - a NAS that adds SAN features is a much different animal than a SAN that adds NAS features.

Psst... TrueNas...

I have no experience with it, but I took a quick look and it seems promising. It supports redundant controllers, which is a must have IMO. Seems worth looking into for a small company's SAN solution.

 

[Mlovelace]

I'm curious where the Dell purchase of EMC factors into this logic?

Same as Dell purchasing VMWare which is Software Defined Everything (Compute, Network, Storage, Desktop...) EMC moved into the unified-storage platform years ago same as Netapp; very few vendors sell pure SANs these days. The point is that the industry is moving towards Software Defined Storage platforms because it gives the user choice and flexibility.

 

[kjnicoletti]

Same as Dell purchasing VMWare which is Software Defined Everything (Compute, Network, Storage, Desktop...) EMC moved into the unified-storage platform years ago same as Netapp; very few vendors sell pure SANs these days. The point is that the industry is moving towards Software Defined Storage platforms because is gives the user choice and flexibility.

I agree with everything you've said - except perhaps the "death of FC". In my experience, iSCSI has only gained traction in low end (read cheap) SAN solutions. But I have no numbers to back that up, it's just what I see in my view of the industry.

By the time you architect a proper iSCSI design - complete with dedicated switches and redundant fabrics, you could have just as easily gone FC without paying any more.

Great quote:

admins tend to like what they know and distrust what they don't. If you've run FC SANs for years, you are likely to believe that iSCSI is a slow, unreliable architecture and would sooner die than run a critical service on it. If you've run iSCSI SANs, you probably think FC SANs are massively expensive and a bear to set up and manage. Neither is entirely true

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/26...bre-channel-vs--iscsi--the-war-continues.html

 

[Mlovelace]

I agree with everything you've said - except perhaps the "death of FC". In my experience, iSCSI has only gained traction in low end (read cheap) SAN solutions. But I have no numbers to back that up, it's just what I see in my view of the industry.

By the time you architect a proper iSCSI design - complete with dedicated switches and redundant fabrics, you could have just as easily gone FC without paying any more.

Great quote:


Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/26...bre-channel-vs--iscsi--the-war-continues.html

We will just have to agree to disagree on FC. BTW that article is from 2010 which is about the last time I had anything running on FC.

 

[jgreco]

mod node: I've evicted this to a separate thread since it did not appear relevant to the original thread,

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/enterprise-grade-build.40943