Tuesday, 15 October 2013

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution High Availability (NSS-HA)

The following looks interesting for low cost storage, highly available NFS storage for VMware vSphere:
http://assetform.dellhpcsolutions.com/download/L2ltYWdlc3ZyX2NlLzIwNzAvZGVsbC0wMDgwLURlbGwgSFBDIE5GUyBTdG9yYWdlIFNvbHV0aW9uLnBkZg==
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/hpcc/storage-dell-nss
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/PowerVault_MD_specsheet.pdf

Dell Fluid Cache for DAS:
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Improving.pdf
http://www.dellstorage.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=3441
http://www.storagereview.com/dell_fluid_cache_overview
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/05/dell_fluid_cache_server_acceleration/


Solution:

  • Two commodity Intel servers running Red Hat Linux (active/passive) with NFS
  • Shared SAS Storage
  • Red Hat Clustering







Low cost Dell MD3260 with 240TB, 60 x 4TB 7.2K SAS drives is $64,514.70:



The Dell MD3260 can be expanded with up to two MD3260e expansion drawers, each with 240TB, 60 x 4TB 7.2K SAS drives at $51,091.50:





A fully expanded MD3260 with two MS3060e for a total of 720TB is priced at $166,697.70 or $231 per TB.

Performance on a MD3260 with one MD3060e expansion array is reasonable for a low cost, high capacity storage array, but could be further improved by using SLC based SSDs:

In case of failure of one NFS server, the clustering software will activate NFS on the the failover server in 30-60 seconds. This should be fine with vSphere parameters:  NFS.HeartbeatFrequency, NFS.HeartbeatDelta, NFS.HeartbeatTimeout and NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures can be tuned:
                http://cormachogan.com/2012/11/27/nfs-best-practices-part-2-advanced-settings/

Above is great for high availability at one site, but how would you would you achieve DR to another geographical site? Here are some good vSphere alternatives:


  • vSphere replications (introduced in vSphere 5.1):     
  • Zerto:               
                http://zorangagic.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/zerto-zero-rto.html
  •   Veeam Backup/Replication
                http://www.veeam.com/


Update 19/10/2013:
Dell also sell this as completely integrated solution as their NAS NX3610
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/powervault-nx3600

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