FreeNAS as a SAN

[LaserAllan]

Hi there!

Okay so the thought has been on my mind for sometime now.

I would like to know if there are people who have experience in using FreeNAS as a SAN.

My requirements are:

• 10 Gigabit at least
• Getting the speed as close to local storage as possible.
• Needs to handle 50k IOPS at the minimum.

Now I know TrueNAS might be a better choice but I would like to do an experiment with lets say 6-8 SSD's in 2 way mirrors and then add an Intel P3700 as a SLOG device to the pool.

My current setup is:

• x3 vm hosts (Dell Poweredge R620 128 gigs of ram each, running ESXi Enterprise Plus). Booting from sd cards that are am runing in Raid1.
• x2 Arista 7050 48 port 10 gigabit switches (Only for the SAN traffic, in this case I am running NFS)
• Netapp FAS 3050 x24 2TB SAS Drives.
• x2 pfsense XG1541 firewalls for production.
• x2 Juniper SRX 210 in HA. (admin firewalls)

So why would I like to change from WAFL to ZFS in this production environment?, Well mostly due to the cost of using netapp and I would also like to really see if ZFS can compete speedwise.
Currently we run around 500 vms from the current cluster. Working very nicely with veeam as the backup agent.

So my question is can ZFS do this?, my thought hardware wise here is to get a Dell 1U server as a controller with ESAS and then just connect JBOD shelfs to it with ESAS.
I currently have between 0.2-0.5 MS in latency to the storage system. I can easily push above 50k IOPS. It would be nice if ZFS can replace this.


Thanks in advance

 

[m0nkey_]

I do believe your best option is in fact TrueNAS. FreeNAS does not have any high availability as that's a feature reserved for TrueNAS (iX Systems have got to make some money somewhere! ;)) and it sounds like you are building a HA environment. A single FreeNAS server will not be suitable.

Recommend you give iX Systems a call to discuss your requirements.

https://www.ixsystems.com/truenas/
https://www.ixsystems.com/contact-us/

 

[drinking12many]

Id have to agree with m0nkey here, your going to want some redundancy etc as I doubt your current FAS is only one head. At a former employer, we dumped our FAS's mostly due to support costs and moved over to Oracle ZFS appliance and even with a lot less drives they were a lot faster. Though they definitely had their own bugs, but support was light years cheaper than Netapp. If you only have one controller now (which would scare me to death) then maybe your plan could work. 50K IOPS is honestly nothing anymore. We got 250,000 iops and up to 5.7GB/s over FC on a small Pure storage flash array 4 years ago with 24 drives if I remember right.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

Yes, it should be possible, if you really want HA of a ZFS pool, you either have to go with TrueNAS or another platform (Solaris, OpenIndiana, Nexenta...).

I'm not sure what your needs are as far as HA but ZFS is not a 'shared drive' system, so each node cannot independently access the same volume. You either have to fail over or use another file system like Gluster on top of two (or three or four) ZFS nodes. The NetApp system you have doesn't seem to have much of HA either, all your drives are in a single controller so if your controller goes, so goes your data system.

You shouldn't need a SLOG if you are going pure SSD drives, just use proper (non-desktop) SSD drives like the Intel DC series (which should easily give you 100k IOPS each).

 

[LaserAllan]

Id have to agree with m0nkey here, your going to want some redundancy etc as I doubt your current FAS is only one head. At a former employer, we dumped our FAS's mostly due to support costs and moved over to Oracle ZFS appliance and even with a lot less drives they were a lot faster. Though they definitely had their own bugs, but support was light years cheaper than Netapp. If you only have one controller now (which would scare me to death) then maybe your plan could work. 50K IOPS is honestly nothing anymore. We got 250,000 iops and up to 5.7GB/s over FC on a small Pure storage flash array 4 years ago with 24 drives if I remember right.

We currently running dual FAS 2252 nodes in metrocluster and yes with dual heads ofc. I am personally running an ancient 3050 that is only one head but i will add another head as soon as I can.

But I would rather like to run ZFS as an appliance towards vmware-veeam rather than an ancient netapp system.
One thing that oculd be okay would be if FreeNAS with SSD or any custom configuration to the ZFS parameters can push 100k IOPS.