Experience with Dell Powervault MD3000
Hey everyone. Haven’t been writing since I got back from the conference. Been busy with other things. But I would love to get some input on something I don’t have any experience.
I am evaluating possible solutions for expanding storage on our servers. All the way from a full blown SAN to something as simple as ripping out the hard drives currently in the servers and replacing them with larger units. One of the possibilities is using a Powervault MD300 which is a direct-connect RAID unit that can attach to up to four servers. It would resolved some space issues we have on a few servers without require an enormous expense of a couple of SANs. In theory it should actually be faster than the internal RAID as it has a larger cache.
Things I am particulary interested in:
- general impressions
- reliability
- is having four servers going to slow it down that much?
- the java software for management…I understand it can work from any client computer. Does this mean you don’t have to install any additional software on the server itself?
Thanks!!
3 Comments so far
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I’m not familiar with the MD300, but we use SANs for all our MySQL database servers. One of the things continually stated by SAN vendors is that they have lots of cache… The gotcha, however, is how quickly that cache gets used up by having multiple servers attached (once the databases get big enough to need SAN storage, the transactions are usually high enough to nullify the cache on the san/storage processors).
The advantage to having a storage system that you can directly attache to multiple servers is you reduce the read latency you’ll see on a SAN due to the network devices, etc.
The key is being able to distribute the disks in your external storage device in such a way as to get the most number of spindles per server. This works great and is easy to do with a SAN, but you’ll have to check how that works with the MD300
This should be interesting for you:
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/10/01/dell-md3000-great-das-db-storage/
ah83 — you get a million bonus points.
After looking at that page I remember reading it but I had forgotten about it until you reminded me. Kids, this is what happens when you get older. You end up needing a RAM upgrade!!