We are going to purchase a new main storage device. I would like to see more opinions on the selected products which are quite similar in my opinion.
The history of both products is also quite similar except the purchase of ScaleIO by EMC which increased the pricing of ScaleIO but made this product much more "reliable" in all points of view also. The pricing of Storpool is interesting, the bundled services also, in fact the whole sales model is OK. But I am not able to find enough independent information about Storpool which could mean that the product is just good or...
Do you have some deeper experiences with Storpool? Thank you.
Is vendor after sales support is important to you? Frankly at this point, technically, it won't matter as much anymore..
Assumption: 10Gbps dedicated "iSCSI only" network bandwidth
with jumbo frames enabled.
This will probably work out to maybe 800MB/sec maximum throughput per link - this is the demand your storage has to provide.
Proposed Solution: Based on one link, just plan your storage IOPs to be able to write to disk @ 2400MB/sec (800MB x 3).
Justification: No matter how many servers you intend to attach to the storage, because iSCSI is the protocol of choice, the network will be the bottleneck. 800MB/s calculation throughput takes into account network overheads. 2400MB/s takes into account disk redundancy overheads.
With the additional context and detail, e.g. need for iSCSI, SQL Servers, Windows, 4 x PMs, no virtual, 20TB (is that raw, or protected usable?), your options for doing with software include Microsoft Storage Spaces/SOFS (e.g. with 2012 R2), or Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) and Storage Replicat (SR) however thats not GA yet. Other software options for your scenario include Starwind for doing a converged approach. For non-converged there is datacore amont other software or even use windows storage server for that matter. Then there are the various CI/HCI folks that do non virt for windows like Gridstore among others. Of course the CI/HCI folks have a value prop if you can convert to a virtual environment to use Dell/EMC/VCE, Maxta, Nutanix, Pivot3, Simplivity, Tintri among others. While not trendy, your solution could also be something like an EMC VNX/Unity or similar system with direct attached (or switched) iSCSI.
Cheers gs - vExpert & MVP
Hi guys, thanks for the current responses. I missed that Storpool doesn't have native iSCSI support currently which is a problem for me because I do not want to build some linux bridge with iSCSI target between our servers and storage. The planed capacity for the storage is 20TB usable capacity. We will use the storage for MSSQL databases mainly so we want to connect our windows server with the storage over an iSCSI. We count with up to 4 MSSQL powerfull physical servers which won't be virtualized in any way.
It really depends on your use-case. What do you think you will use the storage for over a period of 3 to 5 years?
Have only used ScaleIO not Storpool - no basis for comparison. My perspective on all the pure play SW products is to wait one more server cycle for NVRam, products like the new Samsung 1 million IOPS SSD for io caching and commoditization of high capacity SSDs (4+ TB). These are all either here and pricey or being introduced over the next two quarters and will radically improve performance and capacity of the storage part of your new platform. Additionally, HCI products like VxRail offer scale and performance using All Flash at reasonable price.
If just looking for a storage subsystem, the Unity system from EMC hits all the big buttons.
What operating systems are the servers? Do you need hypervisor support? Assume you are looking for block access, or do you need or want file access? How many servers? How much storage space or number of devices, assume you are looking for something with direct attached that can be created into a software defined storage system? Storpool is linux centric so if you are all Linux that and ScaleIO are good options. If you want to create an external software based storage system with your own server/drives, datacore, starwind among others are options. If you are mixed windows, *nix, vmware etc, ScaleIO is good option, if you have vmware, than vsan. Likewise if windows centric, there is storage spaces (or in 2016 S2D), SOFS, etc. Likewise many CI/HCI options as well. Comes down to what are you trying to do, need to do, use or choose your own hw, or have it prescribed to you, number type of servers, OS, hypervisors etc...
Nutanix is more popular in the market and the product is so good enough
It really matters what you're trying achieve. I've no experience with Storpool, If you looking for performance, windows, vmware support then go with ScaleIO. We've done POC with ScaleIO and EMC stood strong in terms of guaranteed IO throughput and read/writes. I see StorPool does not support windows or Vmware. CEPF is also alternative for SDS for block storage.
Nutanix is also very good.
they are all similar but the best SDS is Nutanix if you had try how simple PRISM and the true power of Acropolis distributed storage fabric
VSAN still use RAID at disk level
NUTANIX use RAID at metadata level
no further explaination
i have no expirience with scaleio or storepool. I think you have to take a look on Datacore and VSAN also. We are going to hyperconverged (nutanix or simplivity).
With StorePool No experience with it. But if you are looking for a Hypercoverged solution with Extreme IO reliability look at ScaleIO or Atlantis Hyperscale. I am deploying a solution on Atlantis, its the best thing since Mobile Money.