@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List:

@BBigford and @zuphzuph were asking about this and I figured we should talk about it here. If you are shopping for a SAN, what is your vendor short list?

How does PureStorage fit into all of this?

@travisdh1 said in iSCSI port w/Windows iSCSI initiator dropping:

@art_of_shred said in iSCSI port w/Windows iSCSI initiator dropping:

Is Free-NAS ever a good idea? I've only ever heard nasty things said about it.

Only if you know nothing about building and managing storage is it going to serve a purpose. BSD or Solaris without the added bits would be the preferred route to use ZFS.

And if you don't know those bits, you should not be running a SAN.

@Dashrender said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

@scottalanmiller said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

Also the needs of a SAN are different than the needs of a LAN. So you likely want different switches. I'd love Netgear Prosafe unmanaged on my SAN but would generally prefer Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches on my LAN.

Any opinion on Unifi Switches yet?

We use one in the lab and it's been great, but we aren't pushing its limits or anything.

@JaredBusch said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101:

@scottalanmiller said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101:

@s.hackleman said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101:

I didn't get to make it up, but I have been watching the sessions and burning up my data plan. Thanks for posting these. I also wanted to take a minute to call out the guy sitting front and center to just surf the internet the entire time SAM is talking.

I didn't even notice that, I'm going to look for it now.

In the red? That is @DustinB3403

Ha no it is not!

It goes to 11, so it must be better than the ones that only go to 10.
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Sorry, can't help myself sometimes.

@Romo said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

@FATeknollogee said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

Paging @KOOLER Will the performance of the appliances be as good or better than the native windows install?

It must be at least as good, why release an inferior product.

Nissan has GT-R cracking 0-100 in sub 3 seconds but it doesn't mean Nissan Altima doing same 0-100 in low 10s suck 😉 Every product has own target niche.

@thwr said in iscsi target Path configuration:

@scottalanmiller said in iscsi target Path configuration:

Last system I checked LVM and mapper were equal symlinks pointing to the same thing. I checked it because I was documenting on CentOS.

Still interesting. Device mapper is just that, a mapper pointing to LVM (and LUKS) devices for example. So your mapper and LVM are both pointing to something "physical" like md devices or sd*?

Both pointing to the dm device, which is another layer of mapping.

@dafyre said in Linux: The Role of DRBD:

@scottalanmiller said in Linux: The Role of DRBD:

I added a header into the main topic list for that. But it is going to be later in the Advanced Topics, section. Oddly, I know of pretty much no standard Linux Administration tomes that cover DRBD. It's so core, very odd that it so often gets missed.

Could it be that most Linux Admin's don't know about it until they go searching for it? ...That's how I found out about it.

You would hope that the people writing the books would know, though!

Added: https://mangolassi.it/topic/9796/how-reliable-is-your-server

I think describing the heads as moving in and out is more appropriate since they're mounted on an armature, like a record player, and not forward or backward. I often use record players as a description for clients when they ask how drives work.

In my writing, I try to avoid use 'but' and things like it (however, etc.). Replace the word 'but' with 'and' as an exercise to see how it changes your readers' perception.

You've got a couple sentences that are like Yoda. Eg, by doing this, and it's unnecessary.

Similary, the logical volume... You missed a comma. The same occurs in drive impressions, the stack.

A good article, and a great way to open discussion on SANs and how volumes, drives and RAID presentations can be partitioned or utilized efficiently.

@Dashrender said:

Most storage devices in this range also lack the support options that enterprise servers do.

This sentence is the third italicized block of text seems odd.

Fixed, thanks.

thanks, fixed.

@Jason said:

Almost any NAS can do iSCSI a SAN is simplier than a NAS..

Exactly, but a few scale outs don't because of the scale out aspect.

I forgot about this topic and found it mentioned in a conversation. This thread was a great resource that never got linked anywhere useful. Now to figure out how to make it more referenceable.

@ntoxicator said:

Unless there is another distributed file solution that can make work for their Mac / Apple eco-system.

If they happen to be using Gmail for their email you may want to look at AODocs. Amazon WorkDocs is another option.

@ntoxicator said:

Always complaining to me the slowness of mac's even though they're spec'd accordingly. Soon as you kill dropbox.. runs fine. had to implement alot of QoS on their network to throttle DB traffic.

Did you make any changes to the LAN Sync feature in Dropbox? I've always seen big improvements when blocking cloud sync services over WLAN within the office via endpoint software. e.g. Symantec