Using iSCSI NASs (QNAP, Synology, etc.)

[impaladoug]

I'm not seeing many references to people using devices like QNAP, Synology or others as the block devices for StarWind Virtual SAN. Can StarWind Virtual SAN use any iSCSI targets as storage/block devices that can be added to its storage pools?

I saw one thread in these forums that made reference to the fact that the StarWind iSCSI initiator has been deprecated (pulled out of production and no longer supported), and that people should use Microsoft's iSCSI initiator instead when needing to connect to a target.

So does this mean that using other iSCSI targets as block/storage devices for the StarWind Virtual SAN is supported?

Thanks,
-
Doug Mortensen
Impala Networks, Inc.

[anton (staff)]

Doug, yes you can do it no problem. We don't do iSCSI connectivity for now but you can place StarWind containers (IMG or LSFS) on SMB3/NFSv4 shares/mount points and we'll virtualize, accelerate (local caches & log-structuring & shortened I/O path) and make fault-tolerant your typically backup storage. We'll publish a manual and a white paper on this topic soon. Please stay tuned Thank you!

[impaladoug]

Anton thanks for the response. Just to be clear, are you saying that using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator for this purpose is indeed supported? Or are you saying that the only way that we can/should use a QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS, etc. is if we have StarWind v.San's Windows OS access the QNAP/Synology/FreeNAS via SMB and/or NFS?

Thanks,
-
Doug

[anton (staff)]

You use StarWind to "virtualize" your external storage (SAN/NAS/DAS does not matter). Then you connect with whatever you want to it: can be MSFT iSCSI, MSFT SMB3, Oracle NFSv4 etc. Initiators (clients) do "talk" to StarWind and we hide all background housekeeping from user.

Anton thanks for the response. Just to be clear, are you saying that using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator for this purpose is indeed supported? Or are you saying that the only way that we can/should use a QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS, etc. is if we have StarWind v.San's Windows OS access the QNAP/Synology/FreeNAS via SMB and/or NFS?

Thanks,
-
Doug

[impaladoug]

Thanks for the clarification on this. I ask, because back in February one of your sales guys told me that we had to use direct attached storage. He tried to point me toward the Dell PE R720/R730. We are a Dell shop and didn't mind the recommendation. But it would be nice to use iSCSI sometimes due to its flexibility and true hardware agnostic approach.

Thanks much!

[anton (staff)]

Most of our production scenarios are with DAS. iSCSI uplink would be of a much higher latency compared to SATA / SAS.

Thanks for the clarification on this. I ask, because back in February one of your sales guys told me that we had to use direct attached storage. He tried to point me toward the Dell PE R720/R730. We are a Dell shop and didn't mind the recommendation. But it would be nice to use iSCSI sometimes due to its flexibility and true hardware agnostic approach.

Thanks much!

[impaladoug]

Anton,

Do you feel that DAS is as flexible and scalable as iSCSI?

[anton (staff)]

We compare apples to oranges here...

Anton,

Do you feel that DAS is as flexible and scalable as iSCSI?

[impaladoug]

I take that as a "no".

[anton (staff)]

OK, let me clarify on that

1) We prefer to deal with DAS as it's most cost-effective way to add capacity to hypervisor cluster. We take disks, flash and Ethernet and build a fault-tolerant pool from that.

2) It's absolutely OK to take existing NAS or SAN instead of hard disks and layer StarWind on top so every NAS unit would be effectively as some sort of a "RAID inside" hard disk.
It has typically iSCSI or NFS or SMB connection (Ethernet) so is higher latency and less reliable (switched fabric) then low latency and highly reliable non-switched fabric SAS or SATA.
But it's doable and is supported scenario. Less people use this scenario compared to 1) but it's OK.

I take that as a "no".

[impaladoug]

Anton,

Thanks for the clarification.

Now I'm really curious on the bandwidth we get out of a Dell PERC H800 connected to external JBOD trays (i.e. at what point would we max out a single card's bandwidth [or a single PCI Express bus])?

Based on a quick check, the H800 uses PCIe 2.0 x8.

PCIe 2.0 (per wikipedia) is 500MB/lane. So an 8x (8-lane) card is connected to a PCIe bus that can provide 4GBps (in networking terms this would be ~32Gbps).

However, it seems to me that the major bottleneck here is the H800 card itself. It can only support a data transfer rate of 600MBps (per http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/popu ... l=en&s=dfb).

600MBps storage card (H800) in a 4GBps bus is only using 15% of the bus' capacity.

I checked the H810 and the Data Transfer Rate is still showing 600MBps for that product too...

[Jhon_Smith]

600MBps storage card (H800) in a 4GBps that is right, because it says that its 4 Gigabits. Thus, transferring it to Gigabytes will give you 500MBps.

[Oles (staff)]

Hello guys!
Please let me know if you have any questions left. Thank you!