Homemade SAN Fiber Channel storage?

Question

Do it yourself

Hello.
I want to discuss the technical aspects of creating a SAN storage on my own, which would be connected via a fiber channel and support the functions of various RAIDs, hot swapping of disks and online rebuild of logical disks in case of failure and replacement of a physical disk.
The iron platform can be like this: habrahabr.ru/post/68854/
What software to take is an open question.
As a result, I would like to get something like this: www.ebay.com/itm/HP-StorageWorks-P2000-FC-iSCSI-SA...
Thank you for your attention.

Answer 1

And what prevents to take this most P2000? And in general, what are the performance requirements - how many IOPS, R / W ratio, what task will be spinning inside ESX?
You can just build a server for yourself, put FC adapters there, find software that will work as a target, but it will still be a collective farm, who will support this solution?
If you really want to do everything yourself, put the required number of disks (or SSD disks) into the servers and roll over this clustered storage such as vmware VSA or HP StoreVirtual VSA.

Answer 2

And you would like block access? Today NAS, as it were, is the most fashionable trend. In general, probably. it is worth "dancing" from tasks.

Answer 3

And what is the reason for such a strange, for the present time, choice - FC?
You need block access - take iSCSI. It's cheaper and easier, and with proper application and implementation, it's no worse than FC in practice (especially !!! in a budget solution).
But in general, judging by the purpose of the application, if I were you, I would learn more about using NAS for VMware, I suspect you will discover a lot of new and useful things.

Answer 4

It’s interesting how you plan to make self-twisted storage a target for FC hosts, especially how do you plan to do load balancing between controllers? (In the same hp P2000, this is all there)
After all, there (http://habrahabr.ru/post/68854/) an example of a container was given in which all disk volumes were given to the network as NAS, and not FC SAN storage.

Answer 5

You should not reinvent the wheel if HP is expensive for you, look towards cheaper Infotrend and so on. Since disks make up a very large cost of the array, and you still need to buy them

Answer 6

Your comrades are telling you right, HP has the most expensive disks! You can't stuff into it those that are sold as OEMs (WD, Seagate, etc.). You can look in the direction of all sorts of QNAPs, but the performance there will be very low. By the way, but you were talking about FC, do you know how much an optical switch and HBA cost?

Answer 7

Author, write, what is your budget and requirements for disk space and performance (if any)?