Posts by Michael Duke 158 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jan 2008
Cicso could not use the FC/FCOE combo cards to have the Nexus front end the storage in the same way a MDS9122i can add iSCSI to an FC only array.
Present FC LUNS to the Nexus and use the Nexus as a presentation manager for the FCOE hosts. This would simplifiy transition for legacy FC only arrays as well providing a fabric upgrade option to large business with existing infrastructure.
In NZ the Acer 5420 was an Aspire not a Extensa. In fact the Extensa range has only been available in NZ for about a week or two.
Back on topic I will be looking at this as I want a SCC but none of the current machines have convinced me yet. The EeePC 901 would probably do what I want but it does not have quite enough storage.
Well I am not a fan of the MSA1000/MSA15x0 for a VM environment having worked on a couple but then it is a 7 year old design.
But the cache mirroring sounds like a step forward for true Active/Active.
I am a little disappointed that there is no mention of using the MSA70 shelf with 2.5" disks, but maybe that announcment will come later, for now this looks like a promising box at a reasonable price.
The AX4 is nice but not supporting Mirrorview or SANCopy on the iSCSSI version and no VMWare certification yet for the iSCSI AX4 with VI 3.5 are both issues for me.
If you want a reasonable Gigabit switch there are products like the Linksys SR2024 which retail for around the USD300 mark. This is a wire speed unmanaged switch which will be fine for basic port bonding. A freeNAS machine with 2-4 GigE NIC's hooked to a SR2024 will give reasonable performance as long as you have enough disk spindles to provide the performance. It can be done fairly cheap but it requires a little unconventional thought and some reasonable knowledge of networking and storage. This will work fine at home but you are still looking at probably USD4K for 8TB of raw storage (16 x 500GB Disks) that will deliver a maximum of 1200 I/O's per second (IOPS). Cheap when compared to enterprise storage but still not *CHEAP*.
For the poster above. Broadcom do offer a bonding driver for Windows for there gigabit cards and with generic Broadcom NIC's in the USD50 range at that. But what home user switch has even a fraction of the capacity to make use of it? WIthout a decent switch you could have ten cards bonded and it would not help throughput.
As for the "Cheap" 10gigE solution, the NIC's are not the issue, 10gig switches are few and far between and have port costs that make fibre channel look cheap.
iSCSI is only as good as the rest of the infrastructure, you can have an iSCSI box with mech throughput but if the network is not capable of wire speed switching then all you have done is move the bottleneck. I build storage solutions for a living for customers and invariably these days a badly performing iSCSI solution is because of a badly performing network infrastructure rather than an issue at the storage array.
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