I want to get a SAN that does bitrot protection. I have heard that because of support contracts companies routinely upgrade their sans every three years so that sounds like a great thing for home labbers.
I was looking at the Lenovo DE series for under $10k but I have recently been told that Santricity does not do bitrot protection. But, I am assuming that an iscsi on Ontap would have bitrot protection?
Anyway, I need help finding a good SAN if someone could be so kind. I would even paypal you some money for the help.
In terms of my needs, like I said, bit rot protection of course. And I would prefer 2.5" and 2U with plentiful options for expansion to larger chassis. Connections could be just ethernet but fiber would be better. Update: I would also like for the unit to not be very loud. This will be in a home office.
zfs is the only thing that I know of that has bitrot protection. You will need to read one of the manuals on how to use it. zfs is software that can be installed on many linux and freeBSD operating systems, if you want a pretty interface “truenas” is a good one. you can either build your own, or go to ixsystems and have them build one for you, burned in, tested, partially configured, with support.
Unless you get one of their few home style systems from ixsystems, it will be loud.
To mitigate the noise, you should get a sound isolation rack. Those run from $250 to $4000, depending on your requirements, ie is black plastic ok, or do you require oiled walnut or teak? The sound isolation rack can drop the noise level from 30DB to 70DB. Or you can put it in your clothes closet, and cut the top and bottom (you need to do BOTH) of the closet door a bit to give some more ventilation.
In the last couple of years I think that a few of the consumer NAS companies have started supporting zfs, but I have not kept track of the details.
So you know, netapp had the only commercial license from Sun Microsystems to sell computers for the SAN marketplace that used ZFS. That is their claim to fame, after solaris was open sourced, that capability is no longer exclusive to netapp.
You probably do not want an old enterprise san. Most need to be in contract to get updates, require very specific drives be used (that will not be included,) and were not removed gently.
I have seen videos of a Lenovo DE 2u unit. It boots loud but gets quiet. But that unit is brand new. If possible I would love something similar in sound level.
Forget what I said about quiet. I can buy a soundproof rack with the money I save NOT buying a brand new san. Also please no more suggestions for zfs. I already have and use zfs and im interested in a SAN now.
Dude, the Oracle ZFS appliance is the only SAN I can think of that will have what you ask (Fiber channel, ISCSI over ethernet, multiple shelves, storage replication, infiniband support, ‘bitrot safe’) without buying a PureStorage or an EMC somethingsomething …
Or am I missing something and you want something from a specific vendor?
sometimes yes. retired SANs are not common in home labs for reasons.
people use ZFS in home labs, for reasons.
the advice you will get echos these statements, for reasons.
The only other san options I know off the top of my head are glusterfs, ceph, and xsan. xsan is mostly macOS. ceph is if your client is non linux, glusterfs is if your client is linux.
Both cluster and ceph run on a cluster of computers, which often use zfs to interface to the hard drives.
I had a sys admin friend who connected hard drives directly as iscsi block devices on the network, on 5 different computers, then had the client run zfs to make array from amongst the various remote devices with a local read and write cache, but that sounded fragile.
If we’re talking fiberchannel and disk scrubbing, yes, I am not sure how much trust the RAID scrub trusts what the hard drive thinks though, the docs say a scrub runs for 6 hours and that looks weird to me without specifying a disk size …
The requirement for licensing stands for the Oracle SANs as well, there will be feature locked behind a license/support contract …
Absolutely, though it is a good idea to maintain the same level of redundancy on all vdevs in a pool. ie say you had 5 8 drive raidz2 vdevs in one pool. It would be a bad idea to add a 4 drive stripe to that pool, as it would make the whole pool unreliable. If you have a need for an unreliable data store, it is probably best to put that in its own pool.
I am planning to put my VMs in a pool with redundancy, but put their virtual memory scratch disk on an optane drive that will not be mirrored.
