After our recent NAS problem it seems i got some benefits from that, my director finally accepted to get a new SAN server, so i want your opinion i am looking forward to get about two Tera storage with the best performance possible so which brands and models do you recommend for me ?

Illrigger is far better at that level of hardware than I am ... So I think we'd best sit and wait for his answer to this.

I am waiting for Illrigger for sooo loong,...ding ding.

LOL List the requirements for the device, volume of data, #of users, load growth potential, etc. and we'll try to get this started.

mm 2000 users , 2 Tera of data, and performance does matter so much.

Sorry, been too busy this week to check the boards much. I'll get back to you in a few minutes, after the morning crap settles down.

EDIT: OK, I have a few minutes. What types of services will the SAN be hosting, and what kind of servers will be attached to it?

The big thing you need to understand is that a SAN is not a drop-in replacement for a NAS. A NAS has a head-end that does file hosting, and a SAN does NOT. A SAN is essentially a flexible high performance external drive array, and needs to be attached to a server to actually do anything, so be sure to budget that in. The beauty of a SAN is that it can be direct attached to multiple servers simultaneously, making it ideal as a centralized storage medium for all your apps.

For a 2TB array without performance concerns, I recommend a 14-disk array of 146GB 15,000 RPM drives in RAID5 with a hot spare. For higher performance, go with a 14-disk 300GB 15k drive array in RAID10 with a hot spare.

Well it will carry home folders and some databases, is there any brand and model that you recommend ?

I think Illy wants you to clarify the SAN -vs- NAS issue first, you used them some what interchangeably in you're first post.

Which one our target SAN or NAS?

Well our nas is very slow, with roaming profiles and home folders it take long time on Sat morning for all people to login, while i know the limitation of our network infrastructure which still 100mbps on client side, but i think the nas IO itself is slow, with a bench marking using windows system monitor i have the harddisk queue always 100%, something else is backup the database you know that SQL cannot backup to a mapped drive so i need to something appear as a local HD with a good performance.

The best brands IMO are EMC and HP. HP is more high-end, so look at EMC. They make an entry-level model, the CX300, which should be sufficient for your needs. Just remember that a SAN is not a stand-alone device - you need to attach it to a server for clients to access it.

However, you might not even need a SAN. A good server with a properly-configured, large direct-attached SAS array is almost as fast as en entry-level SAN; SAN is really for an environment where you need to attach multiple servers to a central storage array.

Our main file servers are as follows:

Academic side: ~3400 students with roaming profiles, limited to 200MB each, 300 faculty with unlimited storage, all academic departments (~30 department shares). This is a dual processor Dell PowerEdge 2800 with 4GB of RAM and ~1TB of 10k RPM 146GB drives in RAID5 with a hot spare, direct attached with a hardware RAID controller. It keeps up fine speed-wise, but is getting tight on space and is due for replacement in January.

Admin side: ~500 staff and administration no roaming profiles but most of them have large PST files mounted on their home shares (extremely high I/O, way more than roaming causes). There are also ~150 department shares that get fairly high I/O as well. I just replaced this server last month, it's a PE 2950, dual quad-core xeon box (WAY overkill) with 4GB of RAM and redundant SAS RAID controllers attaching an MD3000 SAS array with fifteen 300GB 15k RPM drives in RAID10. That gives us about 1.9TB of storage and as high an I/O rate as you can get on a DAS array.

SAS is 3Gbit in speed to each drive, and a 3Gbit link to the server; fiber-attached SAN is 4GBit. The processing engine in the SAN is faster than the RAID controllers in the SAS array, but the cost was considerably less as well - nearly half what a CX300 would have cost. I gambled that the I/O would be enough to last us 4 years, and that the difference wasn't worth $25,000.

Sorry guys, don't mean to side track the thread, but... PST files? For what? I thought you were running Exchange?

Yeah, but nobody ever deletes ANYTHING here - education breeds paranoia. Some of these people have 5+ GB of mail, dating back 10 years. I cap them at 200MB on the exchange server because SAN storage is so much more expensive than the SAS drives on the file servers.

Thanks so much Illy,

but you don't have problems with this roaming quota ? like missing outlook configuration or desktop settings?


i have the same thing but i find that backup pst files is better than backup mail boxes and having a pst file make user feels more safe, you know computers didn't become this easy tool for all people yet, sometimes i find a user calling me asking me if he have to make a backup for himself and sometimes i find users copied the pst file several times thinking that he is protecting himself with doing so.

Oh, we have ALL KINDS of problems with roaming profiles, because we have selveral different workstation configurations for the various labs on campus, plus the students often forget to log off, or will start to log off and walk away, only to have the next student be impatient and reboot the computer rather than let the logout finish.

Here's a good one thet I came across last week: did you know that MS recommends that roaming profiles be capped at 30MB? You can set a limit on the roaming profile size in a GPO, but it won't let you set it any higher than that

There is another interesting topic i don't know if you heard about it or not, well recently a guy from NEC came to give us a presentation about NEC products, they have a thin client solution which rely on a nice idea which is the user gonna have a roaming computer instead of roaming profile, server will run VMware ESX and when you have a new employee you will go to your server and create a new Vm for him or her, and the first authentication screen from the user thin client will take him to his own roaming virtual machine, and simply when power gone on client side or if he or she changed his thin client, he will give them access to there exact screen for instance if the user have an excel sheet open and power gone he will back to his work directly.

Meh. People have been doing that with Citrix for years. The problem with thin clients is that they aren't really "thin" anymore; you end up needing really big beefy servers, and yet don't save squat on workstations, because the minimum config on most desktop machines is usually enough for most users to begin with. The Optiplexes we buy are bottom-spec except RAM, and RAM is dirt cheap anyway. There's also the need to upgrade your network backbone to handle the extra traffic that dozens of remotely accessed VMs generate, and that really isn't cheap.

The current next big thing in education is application-level virtualization, since software licensing is so expensive when you have 3000 students and 500 lab machines and many companies want per-user and/or per-installation licensing, even though maybe 100 users might need to use any given app at the same time. ALV allows you to buy a certain number of licenses for an app, and then dole them out as they're asked for, and pushes the software to the workstations as they're asked to start. If you do your homework right for simultaneous usage, you can save a bundle over traditional licensing.

Yeah, i heard about softgrid and what it suppose to do.