VSM 7.7 External Storage Recommendations

[Daniel de Varona]

Good morning folks!

We're looking to add an external storage solution of about 200TB to our data center and I get to use about 50TB of it. Please let me know what make/model you would recommend, that is supported by VSM, if you had $100k to work with. Not sure if iSCSI is an option, but I believe Fiber Channel is.

Thank you!

Danny de Varona

Miami, FL

[Scott Olsen]

What platform are you looking to use for VSM itself? All the UCS chassis can leverage Fiber Channel, so it should be no issue from that perspective?

[Daniel de Varona]

Hey Scott,

The VSOM is on UCS, but our Media Servers in Miami are running on physical servers. We have three other media servers at other sites running on VMs (Cisco NexSans).

That said, we're probably going with a FC Net App.

[Scott Olsen]

I'm assuming that your Media Servers (CPS-MSP?) are located in the same DC that is getting the SAN storage?  I'm still certain you can equip the CPS-MSP chassis with FC cards.

Only other considerations that immediately pop into thought are the number of block devices carved off for each media server, and any potential limitations on their volume.  What OS are they running?  RHEL 5.8?

[Daniel de Varona]

VSOM - RHEL 5.8

Physical VSMS - 2 X SUSE 10SP1, 1 X RHEL 5.8

VSMS - 2 X RHEL 6.4, 1 X RHEL 5.8

Were going with NetApp and I'm probably going to create two 25TB Media Servers. That said, I'll probably ask TAC about migrating the archived video to the new servers. Do you have any experience on that?

[Scott Olsen]

Sure do, and I would bet you aren't going to like TACs response.  It will likely be one of the following;

1) Establish an LTS VSMS instance with all the capacity you need and use VSM to ship all the existing archives to the LTS instance before you redo the media repos on the servers.

2) Spin up new VSMS servers (... and all the expense that implies) with your new desired media repo setup on the new SAN, and then point all your camera endpoints at the new VSMS instances.  Then proceed to wait out the timeframe required (based on your retention period) for VSM to organically groom away on the old archives while accruing all new video on the new SAN.

These were the solutions I was provided when I inquired about a similar situation for a client.  I inquired at both the TAC and PDI level... which  by extension was fielded by the BU.  Of course, the situations are not completely identical as we were hoping to forklift-replace an entire VSMS server, where you *may* be able to just perform some OS level disk administration.  I'm skeptical, however.

I was informed that there was no way to manually ship/relocate archives.  Do please share your results if they happen to offer you an alternative.

Cheers.

[Daniel de Varona]

Jeez. I might as well just tell the people who use VSM that "we suffered a catastrophic loss of archive video" and start from scratch. That would take a lot less time.

I'll touch base with TAC when the time comes and let you know what they recommend.

Thank again Scott. Be well.