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RE: Best practices for new RAID group
by Moshe Linzer 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

I agree with Tom. Your best bet is to add 6 disks to a new raid group. No sense in having all those spares sitting around doing nothing. I would try to avoid expanding a 36GB-disk raid group past 14 disks for reliability. Moshe Linzer IT Manager National Semiconductor, Israel Phone: 972-9-970-2247 Fax: 972-9-970-2001 "Yarmas, Tom" <Tom.Yarmas(a)netapp.com> Sent by: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com 04/06/2004 04:19 To: "Stewart, John" <johns(a)artesyncp.com>, toasters(a)mathworks.com cc: "IT Technical Services" <ITTech(a)artesyncp.com> Subject: RE: Best practices for new RAID group The paper you reference is a little dated unless you are still running 5.x of Data ONTAP. Data ONTAP version 6.x included some significant changes to the WAFL and ONTAP RAID. The number of RAID groups is much less relevant than the total number of data drives in the volume. However, adding 1 or two drives to a volume (or RAID Group) is still not the best approach. Your best bet is to add a new RAID group of 6 disks to the volume. You will be adding the disks anyway (over time), and you are using qtrees to divvy up the space, so just add them all at one time and not worry about it. As Chris Thompson pointed out you can use RAID-DP (assuming you are running DOT 6.5), and add 2 disks to the existing RAID group. But that would likely not be optimal because you would still have a small number of "empty" disks in the RAID group and they will be utilized more than the other "more full" disks until space gets more evenly distributed across all of the drives. -tom -----Original Message----- From: Stewart, John [mailto:johns@artesyncp.com] Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 5:44 PM To: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com' Cc: IT Technical Services Subject: Best practices for new RAID group We've got an F740 with three shelves of 36GB disks (the 3rd recently added). We've only got one volume, vol0, with 14 disks in it now (13 data and one parity). We use both CIFS and NFS. We have 7 spare disks (6 of which we'd like to eventually use for data, with one spare of course). I just went to add one of the spare disks to vol0 (running low on space) and got the error: vol add: starting a new RAID group; at least two disks are needed So, as I (now) understand it, we've got to either: - Override the 14 disk limit for a RAID group or - Add a new RAID group to the current volume or - Add a new volume The 3rd choice is unattractive because we like the idea of One Huge Filesystem, that we can divvy up as needed into different qtrees. The 2nd choice sounds like a Bad Idea in that according to this document, section 3.4: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3027.html, that the filer will try to distribute writes evenly between the old and new RAID group... if the new RAID group only contains two disks (we don't want to add more disk space than is needed now), this could be disatrous to performance So is the 1st choice, increasing the size of the RAID group, a viable option? What is the downsize? Only increased risk of a double disk failure taking out the whole system? Is it possible to add a second parity disk to the same RAID group? Am I missing something here? Any clue-by-fours quite welcome. thanks johnS

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RE: Hirearchical Storage Management - Solid state & Hard disk(NAS/SAN)
by Reinoud Reynders 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

Hi Maren, We use here MS Exchange with I-SCSI connection to our filers (fast FC-disks). Because we want a small and flexible DB, we use archiving software from KVS. With this software, we archive all our 'old' mails to a cheaper and little slower NearStore (R150 from NetApp with ATA-disk). This is transparent for our users. This work great and the users can use their email box as a real archive without quota troubles. Best Regards, Reinoud UZLeuven Belgium -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Maren S. Leizaola [mailto:leizaola@hk.com] Verzonden: maandag 14 juni 2004 23:25 Aan: toasters(a)mathworks.com Onderwerp: Hirearchical Storage Management - Solid state & Hard disk(NAS/SAN) Hi, In a lot of the system I can think off a small portion of the data is accessed very frequently and a large percentage of the data is very rarely accessed. An example would be typical email store. Directories of the mail store are read very frequently however once an email is read and responded to they typically are infrequently read again. Are there any systems out there that could would use Solid state disks as the active storage and then you could use something like a NAS or SAN to use as the "slow archive storage". This would permit one to give a much higher performance with and serve more users and have cheaper and slower NAS/SAN backing the system. Pardon my ignorance if what I am asking is common place out there but I've not seen this. Does what I am suggesting make sense? Regards, Maren. -------------------------------------------------------------- HKdotCOM Ltd AIM: MarenHKdotCOM Tel: 852 2865-4865 ext 888 leizaola(a)hk.com ICQ: 39905706 Fax: 852 2865-4100 -------------------------------------------------------------- Join our liquidations list : http://www.lists.hk.com/lists/listinfo/liquidations

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RE: oracle 9i cluster using iScsi?
by Michael Christian 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

Hi Adi, We're running a few 9i RAC clusters. Not a lot in production yet, but we've been stressing and tuning it for over a year. Typically 4 nodes per cluster, using a combination of OCFS/iSCSI and NFS. Datafiles go onto OCFS/iSCSI and archive logs go onto NFS (because OCFS sucks at small files). We're using Redhat 2.4.9-e.38enterprise. We've been working directly with Netapp and Oracle development, pulling them tooth and nail along the cert process, and I believe it just got completed, so we're probably the first in production. Contact Oracle for more info. We even have a bi-coastal set of clusters, with multiple masters running streams replication; as far as I know we're the first at that too. It's difficult to implement, I wouldn't recommend it. Note that we are using the Adaptec 7211C TOEs, not the Cisco drivers. Oh, and by the way, it works great, and many of our NFS DBA's are drooling over iSCSI at this point. It's much faster than NFS, and much cheaper than FCP, and when 10gig comes out, it will be much faster *and* cheaper than either. There are some Adaptec tuning parameters I can share if people are using the 7211C's. It helps to raise the inflight cap. Also, there are some hacks you can do to force linux to mount multiple luns. By default it only scans the first lun per target (because of a problem with CD stackers trying to scan every cd at boot). The Adaptec instructions tell you how to rebuild the kernel, which, of course, defeats your Oracle support. There is a better way... The downside is that you don't get the great features that have been baked into Netapp's NAS software for so long. Remember that iSCSI is SAN, and Netapp rocks at NAS, but are new at SAN. Snapshots take up a lot of space, a full lun size per snap or +1 lun + 20%,depending on who you talk to. Also, the nice .snapshot directory isn't there. You can implement that with cron jobs quiescing the db, deleting/creating/renaming/remounting snapped luns, but it's messy. Bottom line is that if you're considering a move from NFS, the performance will blow you away, but the maintenance might be a pain in the arse. -Mike Christian -----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Aditya Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 10:44 AM To: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: oracle 9i cluster using iScsi? Anyone have experience(s) running an Oracle 9i cluster with data stored via iScsi? on a netapp? with Solaris or RedHat? We already run iScsi for other things and have no experience (or interest) in DAFS just for Oracle. We're trying to replace Sun 3310 RAID arrays with network-attached storage... Thanks, Adi

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Piecing together a NetApp on the cheap (with IDE) ?
by Joe Schmoe 15 Jun '04

15 Jun '04

I want to put together a very cheap, yet very high capacity NAS. Some of the advanced features of NetApps (like data replication over WAN, etc.) have really caught my eye, but the prices are just too much for my budget. I plan on leveraging the low cost of IDE storage. I have noticed the existence of third party disk shelves/JBODs that accept IDE disks in the front, but present a SCSI interface out the back. So my question is, would it be reasonable for me to buy a very cheap, old NetApp head unit off of ebay (like an F740 for $400) and then attach several of these SCSI enclosures packed with IDE disks to it ? Pesumably, four loaded enclosures at 4TB each (10 400gig IDEs) would give me 16TB, which is very attractive ... Let's set aside the philosophy issue of sourcing third party parts and the advice netapp has regarding that - I am simply interested if this idea is _workable_. The reason I am not looking at the native IDE NetApp units is that they are too new and are not available on ebay for hundreds of dollars. Also, I have no idea if this is even acceptable to NetApp in terms of licensing - do they support ebay purchased gear in any capacity ? Your comments and suggestions, even if tangiental, are greatly appreciated. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger

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Hirearchical Storage Management - Solid state & Hard disk(NAS/SAN)
by Maren S. Leizaola 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

Hi, In a lot of the system I can think off a small portion of the data is accessed very frequently and a large percentage of the data is very rarely accessed. An example would be typical email store. Directories of the mail store are read very frequently however once an email is read and responded to they typically are infrequently read again. Are there any systems out there that could would use Solid state disks as the active storage and then you could use something like a NAS or SAN to use as the "slow archive storage". This would permit one to give a much higher performance with and serve more users and have cheaper and slower NAS/SAN backing the system. Pardon my ignorance if what I am asking is common place out there but I've not seen this. Does what I am suggesting make sense? Regards, Maren. -------------------------------------------------------------- HKdotCOM Ltd AIM: MarenHKdotCOM Tel: 852 2865-4865 ext 888 leizaola(a)hk.com ICQ: 39905706 Fax: 852 2865-4100 -------------------------------------------------------------- Join our liquidations list : http://www.lists.hk.com/lists/listinfo/liquidations

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RE: Piecing together a netapp on the cheap - PART II
by Mike Sphar 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

Fwiw, what we've done at my company for some of those sets of data that just aren't *worthy* of being put on a Netapp, is we've also picked up some SNAP servers. They're basically a cheaper lower-end version of Netapps. (A *lot* cheaper, unfortunately, as now I often have to defend why we need to upgrade the netapp rather than "just buy a few more SNAP servers".) They don't seem to scale nearly as well as the netapps in terms of performance when there are many concurrent users, but for lower-end storage we've been fairly successful with them so far. http://www.snapappliance.com/ <http://www.snapappliance.com/> I think there are several of these low-end appliance solutions on the market now. Snap is just the one we've had experience with here. -- Mike Sphar - Sr Systems Administrator - Remedy, a BMC Software Company

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Piecing together a netapp on the cheap - PART II
by Joe Schmoe 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

Thanks for your help so far. Let me give some more details and answer some of the points you all have raised. First, I am looking for cheap and large - and am willing to sacrifice speed to get it. Second, I am very intrigued by SnapMirror (replication over WAN) and SnapShot copies (point in time backups). The reason I don't just build my own little unix fileservers with linux or FreeBSD is that I don't see how GNU tools and scripting can replicate the functionality of snapmirror and snapshot copies. Maybe I'm wrong ? So, I see that my initial plan is ill advised - you have pointed out that the disk shelves that NetApp ships are not just JABODs, but have intelligence in them - I did not know that the RAID striping was done in the shelf - I thought all RAID and logic was housed in the head unit and it just accessed big stacks of disks. So at this point, my questions are as follows: 1. Is there any reasonable implementation of snapmirror / snapshot copies in free UNIX OSs ? That is, can I get netapp like features out of a normal NFS fileserver ? 2. When I see netapp quote a certain capacity for its filers, like 96TB for the NearStore R200, does that simply mean that they can get to 96TB using the largest currently available IDE drives, and that once larger drives are available that number will naturally go up ? OR does it mean there is some logical limitation in place on the unit that will keep it from going above 96TB ? 3. What is the absolute cheapest IDE based NAS that netapp has put out ? Is it the NearStore R100 ? What if I bought the head unit and shelves from netapp (or netapp branded from ebay), but used my own 400gig hitachi IDE drives ? - I see a 7TB R100 on ebay right now for $78,500 - which is completely absurd. My 4TB freeBSD fileserver at home cost about $5k ... Again, many thanks. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger

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FW: Piecing together a NetApp on the cheap (with IDE) ?
by Jeff Asher 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

I think that the F740 only scales to 1 TB raw storage. To get to 16 TB you need to look at a newer, larger head and those aren't cheap. I believe that the FAS960 is the cheapest head that supports more than 16 TB of storage outside of clustering. The list price on a FAS960 is somewhere north of $80K. All-in-all, I probably wouldn't attempt this with a NetApp. This probably isn't workable. An F740 won't even boot if you try to use some parts that are supported in the F800 series. They are very particular about what is allowed and what will boot. I've found that if you can get the system to boot all the way, then you can probably make it work. I definitely wouldn't bet more than $0.50 on it though. You would be better off using linux, samba, and NFS. If you have to have an iSCSI target, look at www.stringbeansoftware.com <http://www.stringbeansoftware.com/> . They make iSCSI target software for Windows, but I don't know about *nix. ________________________________ From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Joe Schmoe Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 8:17 PM To: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Piecing together a NetApp on the cheap (with IDE) ? I want to put together a very cheap, yet very high capacity NAS. Some of the advanced features of NetApps (like data replication over WAN, etc.) have really caught my eye, but the prices are just too much for my budget. I plan on leveraging the low cost of IDE storage. I have noticed the existence of third party disk shelves/JBODs that accept IDE disks in the front, but present a SCSI interface out the back. So my question is, would it be reasonable for me to buy a very cheap, old NetApp head unit off of ebay (like an F740 for $400) and then attach several of these SCSI enclosures packed with IDE disks to it ? Pesumably, four loaded enclosures at 4TB each (10 400gig IDEs) would give me 16TB, which is very attractive ... Let's set aside the philosophy issue of sourcing third party parts and the advice netapp has regarding that - I am simply interested if this idea is _workable_. The reason I am not looking at the native IDE NetApp units is that they are too new and are not available on ebay for hundreds of dollars. Also, I have no idea if this is even acceptable to NetApp in terms of licensing - do they support ebay purchased gear in any capacity ? Your comments and suggestions, even if tangiental, are greatly appreciated. ________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger <http://messenger.yahoo.com/>

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CRY FOR HELP.
by veronica sly 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

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RE: Piecing together a NetApp on the cheap (with IDE) ?
by Timothy Sesow 14 Jun '04

14 Jun '04

Keep in mind that the enclosures that NetApp uses have internal intelligence that the Filer head talks to. Also, the software expects hardware to be setup in a certain manner and behave accordingly. So, the ability of certain enclosures to work with an F740 would be suspect and you would definitely need to have a DataONTAP version that supports the shelves. Most enclosures have a different interface than from other vendors. NetApp gets its enclosures from various people and they have to do a lot of software just to get them to work reliabily. Apart from the technical issues, I have looked at the prices between the "cheap" JBOD and the NetApp R200 series systems. Yes the "cheap" JBOD costs about 1/2 as much, but it takes a LOT more time to install and maintain. For most (???) sites, I think you get a false economy. For a small subset of sites, there may be the skill and labor to make it justifiable (universities come to mind, cheap or free labor from grad students and low budgets, but then NetApp probably gives them a big discount). Assuming you did get it to work, then support from NetApp would be non-standard, if at all. My best guess is that licensing would probably not be a problem, assuming you don't try to resell any of this. -----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com on behalf of Joe Schmoe Sent: Fri 6/11/2004 6:17 PM To: toasters(a)mathworks.com Subject: Piecing together a NetApp on the cheap (with IDE) ? I want to put together a very cheap, yet very high capacity NAS. Some of the advanced features of NetApps (like data replication over WAN, etc.) have really caught my eye, but the prices are just too much for my budget. I plan on leveraging the low cost of IDE storage. I have noticed the existence of third party disk shelves/JBODs that accept IDE disks in the front, but present a SCSI interface out the back. So my question is, would it be reasonable for me to buy a very cheap, old NetApp head unit off of ebay (like an F740 for $400) and then attach several of these SCSI enclosures packed with IDE disks to it ? Pesumably, four loaded enclosures at 4TB each (10 400gig IDEs) would give me 16TB, which is very attractive ... Let's set aside the philosophy issue of sourcing third party parts and the advice netapp has regarding that - I am simply interested if this idea is _workable_. The reason I am not looking at the native IDE NetApp units is that they are too new and are not available on ebay for hundreds of dollars. Also, I have no idea if this is even acceptable to NetApp in terms of licensing - do they support ebay purchased gear in any capacity ? Your comments and suggestions, even if tangiental, are greatly appreciated. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger

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