Re: [Xen-users] Linux Fiber or iSCSI SAN

[Nick Khamis <symack@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Errol Neal <eneal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 06/11/2013 10:27 AM, Nick Khamis <symack@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>
> Was wondering what people are running these days, and how do they compare
> to the 10,000 dollar SAN boxes. We are looking to build a fiber san using
> IET and glusterFS, and was wondering what kind of luck people where having
> using this approach, or any for that matter.
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Nick.
>

I've built a number of white box SANs  using everything from OpenSolaris and COMSTAR, Open-E, OpenFiler, SCST, IET... etc.using iSCSI and FC.
I've settled Ubuntu boxes booted via DRBD running SCST OR ESOS.
From a performance perspective, I have pretty large customer that two XCP pools running off a Dell MD3200F using 4GB FC. To compare, I took a Dell 2970 or something like that, stuck 8 Seatgate 2.5" Constellation Drives in it, a 4GB HBA and installed ESOS on it.
I never got around to finishing my testing, but the ESOS box can definitely keep up and things like LSI cachecade would really help to bring it to a more enterprise-level performance with respect to random reads and writes.
Lastly, there is such an abundance of DIRT CHEAP,  lightly used 4GB FC equipment on the market today that I find it interesting that people still prefer iSCSI. iSCSI is good if you have 10GBE which is still far to expensive per port IMO. However, you can get 2 - 4 port, 4GB FC Hbas on ebay for under 100 bucks and I generally am able to purchase fully loaded switches (brocade 200e) for somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 bucks each!
MPIO with 2 FC ports from an initiator to a decent target can easily saturate the link on basic sequential r/w write tests. Not to mention, improved latency, access times, etc for random i/o.

Hello Eneal,

Thank you so much for your response. Did you experience any problems with ESOS and your FS SAN in terms of stability.

We already have our myrinet FC cards and switches, and I agree, it was dirt cheap.

Kind Regards,

Nick.

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