Building a SAN from the ground up
Hey all, I'm hoping that the collective wisdom of Icrontic can help me here. Myself and one of my coworkers are starting to put together a proposal for our work to build a custom SAN to extend our backup product line (we work for a hosting company). Thing is, while we have a general idea of how a SAN works, neither of us really have any experience in building one from the ground up. I'm hoping some of you have resources that can help us get an idea of where to start. We need something that will be easy to expand as time goes on and easy to manage as far as adding and removing accounts, controlling access and defining quotas. If any of you have tips or resources, I'd be grateful.
0
Comments
What kind of network access is needed
Are you backing up locally and/or remote sites
How many people need direct access to it
What kind of software does it need to talk to
What kind of redundancy do you need for it's storage
Are you planning on just backing up data to it or using it as usable storage also
For space, probably start out with a few TB, but will need to be expandable easily.
It would be used to back up both local and remote sites (basically leasing the space out to customers).
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by direct access... the only people that need to be able to log in to the boxes would be staff... but the customers would need to be able to access it via FTP at the very least and probably rsync as well...
As for redundancy... we're looking to provide a stable backup solution. I'm figuring that running RAID5 setups w/ hot spares should provide enough redundancy for us given that we're staffed 24/7/365 so should a drive fail we usually have it replaced within 30 minutes.
We're looking simply for backup, not available storage at this point in time.
If Customer A is using your company as their backup provider. What legal guarantees are you going to be able to provide them that A) their data is backed up b) is available c) is secure d) is stored for at least 7 years. How do you expect customers to manage both backing up and retrieving of that information?
As soon as you start dealing with customer data you open up yourself to a large potential of risk and liability. I would highly suggest against just slapping something together and throwing it up. That's not a solution that's a path to disaster.
There's not really a "build from the ground up" that's economically feasible. Look at whether you want to spend a lot of money and go with someone like EMC. Their Clariion line is pretty sweet. I just helped install one before I left my last company. If you want something a little simpler and cheaper, take a look at LeftHand. They were just acquired by HP, and they offer a different setup in that standard PCs are used as front-ends for the SAN.
There's a multitude of offerings, and they range from relatively cheap to exorbitantly expensive. It comes down to what you need and plan on doing with the device. kryyst's questions and statements were legitimate.
Your best bet is to actually look into each individual company's offerings and figure out what you like best. It might even be useful to find a local consulting firm who will help you make choices and answer questions. A lot of them will come out and talk to you, and sometimes provide demo units. They'll usually even not charge you for their services up until you make that purchase. If you've never installed a SAN before, I might look into this if at all possible. They typically provide a knowledge transfer and you can work in credits for training into the cost of the SAN and services.
For this last install I did, I was working with a company called CompServ. They were acquired by Mainline during the quoting phase, but there was no hiccup in service, and they did a great job helping get everything installed and running. Check them out: www.mainline.com
Offsite backup is big business and the real players have underground bunkers that are self contained environments with multiple redundancies for the air cooling alone. So the questions of what exactly you are wanting to offer are critical before you start purchasing and throwing together hardware. A redundant raid 5 server running in the corner of the room is not a secure backup sollution. It's about as Mickey mouse as you can get if it's backing data that isn't yours and you are charging people to use.
Do it right or don't do it. You want to come up with a proposal come up with a full proposal. Hardware is only the smallest of aspects.
We looked at Equalogic too. Their tech is pretty impressive. If I remember correctly, they use a proprietary fabric that runs over ethernet and a proprietary redundancy scheme. It's kinda sorta RAID, but not really. They are definitely worth looking into.
You completely miss the point. I wasn't questioning your abilities or skill set. But to continue your gardening narrative, I'd have asked, why type of climate you live in, what type of plants/flowers you want to grow and how much land you are planning to use. That will get you a more specific and useful answer as to what gardening books you should look at. If you lived in Tuktoyuktuk giving you a tip on growing rose bushes out doors would do nothing for you.
So with your SAN recommendation I could have easily recommended you go get a $500 nas box slap in a few raid drives and left it. - That wouldn't have been good advice though. I could have also gone the other way and started pushing $10,000 IBM sans. But from the sounds of it that's more then what your looking for.