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Full Discussion: SAN vs. Local disk.
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers SAN vs. Local disk. Post 303031279 by bakunin on Monday 25th of February 2019 09:27:32 AM
Old 02-25-2019
Quote:
Originally Posted by ikx
I am in the market looking to purchase a new E950 server and I am trying to decide between using local SSD drives or SSD based SAN. The application that will be running on this server is read-intensive so I am looking for the most optimal configuration to support this application. There are no other servers or applications that will use this SAN (if I decide to go that route.) The deciding factor to me is Performance regardless of the hardware cost (granted I don't want to pay for something I end up not using.) SAN or local SSD (both running RAID 10)? This is really the question I am trying to answer before I pull the trigger and complete this purchase. Any insights from this community is greatly appreciated.
There are a few more points to consider IMHO:

1) disks (regardless which technology) will over time malfunction and need to be replaced. There is some effort involved in such a replacement. SAN systems have usually ways to - more or less - "effortless" replacing disks built in because they usually are used to deal with a lot of disks and the chance that one disk malfunctions rises with the number of disks involved. You might want to do some risk calculation based on how often on average you expect a disk to break (there is usually a "MTBF" - "meantime between failure" number available), how long you expect the change to take and how much a downtime of the expected duration will cost.

2) SANs and local disks do differ in the way they are attached to the system. Local disks may use SCSI or the "M.2" interface. Notice that you cannot have several local (SSD-) disks attached via M.2. SAN, onthe other hand, may use a FC-connection or even several FC-connections in parallel (FC-drivers allow this for redundancy as well as load-balancing). The capacity of such FC-connections may by far exceed the speed of local disks. On the other hand you will need not only a SAN but also a FC-switch (Brocade are the most wide-spread) and the administration ("zoning") will be more complicated.

3) SANs - if set up with this in mind - may add redundancy and thus high-availability to the system. Again, it depends on the system, its purpose, etc.. to calculate properly the risk of it failing for some amount of time. Calculate how much it would set you back to have the system offline for: 1 hour / 1day / 1 week and this will give you an idea how much money spent on preventing these kinds of desasters is worthwhile.

4) SAN systems for themselves are rather expensive. To alleviate this they become cheaper and cheaper (in comparison to local disks) the more you virtualise and the more systems use it. So, a plan to buy a SAN system for a single system only might be on the expensive side but with a expectation of adding other systems using it too the costs may still be reasonable. So you may want to rethink your immediate problem in a more gobal context.

5) Notice that for a system optimised for speed you need an adequate backup solution. For this you also need a disaster scenario plan to estimate what the costs could be and hence how much the prevention may cost. Then you know how fast a recovery needs to be and therefore which technologies you need to employ to get that speed. You can use a SAN also for snapshots (perhaps quickest way of recovering a "point in time"), very fast medium to put an online backup to, only then migrating it to slower media like tapes and similar solutions. You might want to take that also into consideration.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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mkqdisk(8)						      Quorum Disk Management							mkqdisk(8)

NAME
mkqdisk - Cluster Quorum Disk Utility WARNING
Use of this command can cause the cluster to malfunction. SYNOPSIS
mkqdisk [-?|-h] | [-L] | [-f label] [-c device -l label] [-d [-d ...]] DESCRIPTION
The mkqdisk command is used to create a new quorum disk or display existing quorum disks accessible from a given cluster node. OPTIONS
-c device -l label Initialize a new cluster quorum disk. This will destroy all data on the given device. If a cluster is currently using that device as a quorum disk, the entire cluster will malfunction. Do not run this on an active cluster when qdiskd is running. Only one device on the SAN should ever have the given label; using multiple different devices is currently not supported (it is expected a RAID array is used for quorum disk redundancy). The label can be any textual string up to 127 characters - and is therefore enough space to hold a UUID created with uuidgen(1). -f label Find the cluster quorum disk with the given label and display information about it. -L Display information on all accessible cluster quorum disks. -d Increase debugging level. Specify multiple times for more information. Currently, specifying more than twice has no effect. SEE ALSO
qdisk(5), qdiskd(8), uuidgen(1) July 2006 mkqdisk(8)
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