The Textbook Things Gone Wrong in IT Thread

scottalanmiller

We have a few separate network shares hosted on different servers at the moment.

Well four physical servers is the absolute minimum to possibly get value from shared storage and the rule of thumb is ten is the beginning of the reasonable part of the bell curve and a dozen or more start to become likely - but only when they are heavily consolidating and sharing.

scottalanmiller

@coliver said:

May want to look at an R730xd... you can put a crazy amount of disks in that. But really even for 4-6TB you don't need anything like a NAS or a SAN.

4-6TB you can put in a laptop!

Dashrender

Maxing at 6 TB, do you need more processing power and RAM than can be stuck in a single VM host? Or do you have a situation where you can't VM for some reason?

Sounds like a single server with possibly direct attached external storage (if needed for the number of spindles for performance - assuming you can't afford SSD storage) would do the trick - again unless you have work load that requires huge amounts of compute power.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

Sounds like a single server with possibly direct attached external storage (if needed for the number of spindles for performance - assuming you can't afford SSD storage) would do the trick - again unless you have work load that requires huge amounts of compute power.

SSD would be far less than the cost of a DAS chassis and spindles. You could be at a million IOPS for cheaper!

DustinB3403

SAM, again this is the same MSP making this recommendation as in past conversations. . .

We have a few locations some over seas, but they all come back to the main office via our VPN for network shares etc.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

We have a few locations some over seas, but they all come back to the main office via our VPN for network shares etc.

It's not locations, it is the physical number of servers attached to the storage. For SAN you would need roughly ten or more virtualization hosts for SAN to even come up in conversation. That's it. A million users, large storage, many locations, etc. have no bearing on making a SAN more or less useful. SAN has one purpose and if there isn't the large number of host servers directly sharing the storage AND saving money by doing so, the SAN is doing the opposite of its purpose.

DustinB3403

That's my point, we have 3 servers as file servers. And maybe 100 employees, the entire idea is just baffling.

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Sounds like a single server with possibly direct attached external storage (if needed for the number of spindles for performance - assuming you can't afford SSD storage) would do the trick - again unless you have work load that requires huge amounts of compute power.

SSD would be far less than the cost of a DAS chassis and spindles. You could be at a million IOPS for cheaper!

With enterprise drives? Granted I haven't looked at them recently so I really have no clue how much enterprise class SSDs with a RAID 10 array of 6 TB usable would be - though I'm guessing at least $10K just in drives, not counting the enclosure!

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

SAM, again this is the same MSP making this recommendation as in past conversations. . .

Yes, and whoever brought them in seems to be very textbook in their mistakes. Textbook business mistakes (bringing in a reseller claiming to be an MSP who is sending salespeople instead of engineers), getting advice from salespeople who aren't even remotely IT people, using a SAN where it doesn't make sense, etc.

As is often the case, it's an onion. One bad textbook mistake happens because another was done. The SAN might be the top layer. That only happened because a reseller was brought in for advice. That was only done because the IT manager doesn't know IT but doesn't want anyone else to know and is hoping to get someone else to do their job, but since they are trying to hide that fact they can't pay for the advice so have to get free advice from the salespeople. But those things together and the person entrusted to provide good IT advice isn't just not doing their job at all, but has sold the company out to the very people they should be protecting the company from.

The onion of bad IT decision making

DustinB3403

Lets all go out and build a 6TB SSD NAS just for price comparison.

Dashrender

Updated my post to indicate drives only, not including enclosure.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

Lets all go out and build a 6TB SSD NAS just for price comparison.

You wouldn't build it as a NAS, that would be just as foolish as the external storage already there. It's doing it internal and saving all the money of the extra nodes AND the external storage that makes it SO cheap. I mean seriously cheap.

$2,464 for a RAIDed 6TB SSD setup with more than a half million IOPS. This will take nearly any enterprise RAID controller to its IOPS limits.

Are you really paying less than this for the external storage unit AND all of the extra servers?

scottalanmiller

And that is if you leap directly to 6TB today (usable) instead of starting with 4TB and growing later. And that fits easily into a chassis like an R730 with tons of room for future growth.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403

I can't possibly state how bad of an idea it is to have an external enclosure for this BUT I could, just for hypothetical cases, build a 6TB pure SSD NAS, rackmount, full enterprise server chassis.... $3,400. I literally just priced out the drives and server for it.