Cheap but Highly Available Shared Storage? [closed]

my group is in the market for plentiful storage. We traditionally used big-iron FC-attached SANs, but they are way expensive and provide much more performance than we require.

We want highly available shared storage, and if it performs like local desktop-class drives, that's fine.

Are there shared disk solutions out there that can get us slower but bigger disks?

We like NexSan SataBeast but they don't have a fully global presence which makes support awkward (we're a global company).

Is there any storage of this type that you would recommend? We'd prefer to use FC-attached storage but we're open to suggestions.

Thanks,

Wout.

EDIT: To answer the requests for clarification, we'd like

• globally available hardware support
• tens of TB with the ability to grow
• Highly Available: Ability to provide service through common failures, so:
  • hotpluggable drives
  • multipath IO
  • active/active controller
  • Anything like this that has a low cost/benefit ratio
• NFS only might be an option depending on HA-ness and performance
• Price: whatever it costs, but as little as possible

Basically I'm wondering what the 3D graph of price-performance-availability looks like currently. If there are sharp exponential curves, I'd be interested in the systems in those elbows.

As noted below, this could be done by a farm of PC-level hardware serving iSCSI and host-level software RAID6. This proves that whatever an EMC top-end storage array costs, it is probably too much.

Depends on your definition of "Cheap". But you could look at HP LeftHand Starter SANs. It's an all iSCSI solution but provides better performance the more you scale it, uses standard servers for the hardware, has solutions in SATA and SAS varieties to fit your budget and performance needs, and is supported by a global, good customer service, company. The boxes can be setup with no redundancy for maximum disk space (and minimal cost), or up to several layers of redundancy so your data basically cannot be lost short of an act of God.

The performance is comparable to FC, and even can even surpass FC the more you scale it.

How much storage do you need? If you want something in the 10's to 100's of Terabytes you could look at the Sun X4540 (Thumper). Solaris comes with an iSCSI target if you need block level storage or it can be used as a NAS with NFS or Samba.

For those not familiar with Sun's Thumper, it's a 4U 2-socket Opteron box with 48 SATA disks. You can have up to 48TB of disk on a single machine, although with RAID-5 volumes this would be somewhat smaller.

This blog posting discusses some of the ins and outs of using a Thumper as an iSCSI target.

Another option is the secondhand market. You can get re-certified SANs quite cheaply and many (even older ones such as Clariion CXs) have the option of slower SATA or FC-SATA disks. If you don't mind the power bills you can get second hand Symmetrix gear quite cheaply and that has no issues around licensing for the management software - you can operate it through the console on the controller.