[Technical] How do you store your users data?

Thu Jul 24 15:10:34 EST 2008

Howdy,

Why did we go for the SAN? Expansion.

We originally purchased it with 10x 300GB Fibre Channel (FC) disks. 5
are reserved for the SAN's OS, the remaining 5 for our use. After about
6 months we ran out of space. We simply purchased 5 more disks, put them
in (hotswap is lovely), jumped on the Java / Web config page. Created a
raid, added it to the existing drives. Voila, done.

We ran out of space again. So we ended up purchasing 15x 750GB SATA II
drives (and a new shelf). We assigned 4TB for our disk based backup.. We
then decommissioned the server I had put it on. So I 'moved' the drive
to another server. Took approx 15 seconds to move 2.2TB of data from one
machine to another... :P

It gives us a lot of flexibility. At a premium price.

Reliability is also important. If a disk dies, users don't know about
it. We setup 5 disk raid5 on our SAN, but present a 'simple' disk to the
server. The SAN is built to do RAID very very well. If the disk dies, we
replace it and it rebuilds by it self. Performance impact is minimal.

iSCSI or NAS's might be something to look into if your pricing is tight.

Cheers,

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Paul Williamson
Sent: Thursday, 24 July 2008 2:59 PM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi Jason,

We have about 600 students and 120 staff.

I'm guessing your servers with 2 drives are configured in RAID1 and just
contain the operating system and software for that server?

The controller in our fileserver was around $700 and we get about
450mbytes/sec locally from it (of course limited by the network).
Perhaps if we used multiple network cards with a configurable switch to
provide higher bandwidth this would alleviate network throughput as a
bottleneck.

I've been looking at SAN's and it looks to be extremely expensive for
what it actually provides. What particular SAN solution have you set up
there and what made you go for it?

Thanks!!

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Jason Clarke
Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 12:21 PM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi Paul,

How many staff / students are we talking in total?

Because GWSC is large, we're having to resort to a Fibre Channel SAN
attached by Fibre Channel cards. We're able to move TB's of data around
relatively easily because of this.

We're moving more towards servers with 2 SATA HDD's (IBM servers) and
making large amounts of space available by the SAN.

That said, the most important part of the hardware is the controller.
Put in a $30 scsi/sata raid controller and you'll get $30 performance
(divided between your concurrent users.. ouch). Cache on controllers
makes a huge difference. Cache on the HDD's also makes a huge
difference.

Thinking about it.. Maybe purchasing a new server and putting JUST the
mandatory profiles on it would possibly free up a portion of the
read/writes that's hitting your file storage. Given that 1.5MB would be
cached reasonably well.

Then there is backing up of all of it (LTO3 auto changers, off-site tape
storage). Try explaining to users/admin about not spending money after
you've lost data. :)

Regards,

Jason Clarke
------------------
Network Manager
Glen Waverley S.C.
p 03 8805 6750
m 0418 145 318
e jcl at gwsc.vic.edu.au 

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Paul Williamson
Sent: Wednesday, 23 July 2008 11:58 AM
To: tech at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Technical] How do you store your users data?

Hi,

I'm just wondering the sort of setup you use at your school to store all
of your students and staff files, how they access the storage and what
sort of backup/recovery you have in place.

I'll describe our fileserver setup:
Windows 2003 Server Standard
7 SATA Drives in RAID5 + 1 hotspare (gives about 450mB/s local speed on
the server) 
1GBIT Network connection to the core of the network
All files are copied over the network weekly to a backup server

I feel we are starting to outgrow our current set-up and would like to
hear how you store your users data. People are relying on computers more
than ever before so we need to get both redundancy and an increase in
speed happening.

We run a standard windows domain setup. All students use a mandatory
profile (1.5mb) hosted on this server, and then we have group policy
scripts which redirect their desktop and my documents folders to their
space on the fileserver. This means when someone saves a file on their
desktop, it is being saved directly to the server. With 100-150 users
logged on at once, the reads and writes per second are jumping between
10 and 130 and I suspect this could be slowing things down a bit.

Thanks,

Paul Williamson
Huntingtower School
Mt Waverley, Victoria

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Technical Mailing List kindly supported by
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au - Victorian Curriculum and Assessment
Authority and
http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology
Teachers Association Inc

_______________________________________________
http://www.edulists.com.au - FAQ, resources, subscribe, unsubscribe
Technical Mailing List kindly supported by
http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au - Victorian Curriculum and Assessment
Authority and
http://www.vitta.org.au  - VITTA Victorian Information Technology
Teachers Association Inc