Best Practice SAN Design

TechStriker

I want to do storage redesign for small business; requirement will be presenting storage to 4 server.

1 Backup server
1 Database server
1 Exchange
1 File server
Any design advice on high availability will be appreciated.

dynamik

I'm not an expert, but you're going to have to provide much more information to get accurate recommendations. How much data, many users, typical load, etc.

TechStriker

Thanks for the point
200 users, looking to buy 5 – 10 TB storage for capacity planning.
Current in house data 2TB.

I found HP MSA 20 type of storage but wasn’t sure how you could connect 4 servers, with HA in mind.

blargoe

What do they have currently, more specifically? FC attached? iSCSI? Servers going through a SAN switch or directly connected?

TechStriker

They have MSA 1000 and connected SCSI I/O module to the SCSI Adepter in the server

UnixGuy

Have two disk arrays, make sure replication is enabled between them. Two SAN switches, and connect everything through them. You need FC for that, your SCSI won't do.

UnixGuy

Connect a tape library to the SAN switches, and I recommend NetBackup as a back software...

the size and brand of the Disk Arrays and library depends on your budget and requirements

astorrs

UnixGuy wrote: »

Connect a tape library to the SAN switches, and I recommend NetBackup as a back software...

the size and brand of the Disk Arrays and library depends on your budget and requirements

since he said it was for a small business chances are that's overkill.

TechStriker, define what you mean by high-availability (or at least what your reqs are).

UnixGuy

astorrs wrote: »

since he said it was for a small business chances are that's overkill.

TechStriker, define what you mean by high-availability (or at least what your reqs are).

Then we really need to know what he means by Highly available.

TechStriker

Thanks for your reply I really appreciate it. HA I mean serves should always see storage presented to them, eliminating single point of failure and also data should always be backed up, i.e. backup should always run even in the case of hardware or software failure.

sidsanders

backup in case of failure gets costly, and in some cases isnt possible without lots of extras (and may still not meet the goals). for HA, sounds like you want a cluster... doing that for DB/exch/file server isnt a big deal (config wise) and netbackup/others can be clustered. cost gets high in most of these scenarios and not all support active/active. this means you wll see some downtime for a failover. still, many more bits of info would be needed for this.

UnixGuy

Disk arrays are reliable...so you can buy a dual-controller disk array, with RAID 1+0 configure + hotspare.
(If you have some extra cash, buy another disk array, and enable replication, but that's expensive).

Two SAN Switches for path redundancy..i believe this shouldn't be very expensive.

You need a small tape library for backups also.

I will give you suggestions from the stuff I worked on already...they're very reliable.

Disk Array:
Sun StorageTek 2540 Array - Overview

and if you want something slightly bigger, then go for this:
Sun StorageTek 6140 Array - Overview



Now for libraries:
Sun StorageTek SL24 Tape Autoloader - Overview

or if you want something bigger:
Sun StorageTek SL48 Tape Library - Overview

TechStriker

Thanks, guys for your furnishing help I now got an idea about the implementation.