Dell PowerVault MD1000 with Mac OS X Server 10.5 (mac pro with fiber connections)

[chostwales]

Hey Guys. Its time that i add a bulk amount of storage to our mac network.

Currently Our network consists of one mac server which is a Mac Pro with Mac OSX Server 10.5 installed on it with 4 x 750GB Hard Drives with a couple of client machines. I now need to add atleast another 6TB to the network. This needs to be seen as the server as one drive so that 6TB needs to be raid prosume (raid 5)

Now in the Mac Pro server we have a Fibre Card that we dont currently use with 2 slots. My Plan is to buy a Dell PowerVault™ MD1000 (http://configure.euro.dell.com/dell...5&l=en&oc=SV41000&s=bsd&sbc=pvaul_md1000_sata) and put in the amount of hard drives i require into the Dell Storage.

Would this work. If i bought the Dell PowerVault™ MD1000, would i beable to hook this upto the mac server and use it as a storage drive? Although i do no networking. Im still very new to this.

Ideally im looking for something similar to an Xserve Raid, but with out the Apple price tag on the outside if you guys no what i mean.

Best,
Nathaniel

 

[Eidorian]

The XServe RAID is no more. You're fine picking whatever big, dumb, smart storage solution that fits your budget.

 

[belvdr]

That should work, and I have had very good support and performance from NexSan arrays.

 

[powderblue17]

I don't think the MD1000 will work because it's designed to be plugged into Dell servers. You need to have a Dell Perc card installed installed in a Dell server for it to work as far as I know. I don't see how you could configure it anyway since the MD1000's I have use the server administrator program which is only for windows and linux.

 

[chostwales]

Hey. Thanks for your reply guys.

I have just been looking at this as well and i think you are right.

What is the best way to do this?

I need the most cost effective way. The MD1000 seemed like such a good idea in theory. With 750gb HD's only £80 each. I could put 10 in for only £800 plus the £1,500 cost of the server and attach them as one big hard drive to the Mac Pro server.

Saving 4k on an Xserve Raid

Thanks,
Nathaniel

 

[belvdr]

I'd take a look at NexSan:

http://www.nexsan.com/sataboy.php

You can get 14TB in 3U with that thing. I've had great support and easy installs with their hardware.

 

[chostwales]

So your saying i could put 14 x 750 gb hard drives at Raid 5 to give me about 7TB of storage (cant remember how to work out the exact amount).

And connect it to the mac pro server using 2 x SPF Fibre connections (I have a SPF Fibre card in the mac pro) and the server would see it as a extra hard drive? or what?

Im going past my comfort zone in this, but our company needs it desperately.

Thanks,

 

[belvdr]

That's exactly what I'm saying. The NexSan device has its own controller and manages the array, so it is entirely self contained. You then present that array, in the form of LUNs, to your host. You can present it as one huge LUN, or several smaller LUNs. It's your choice, really. Once presented, you format the thing on your Mac Pro, just as you would any other disk.

To calculate RAID 5 storage, take the number of physical disks (14 in this case), subtract 1 (now 13), and multiply by the size (750GB). This works out to 9750 GB roughly.

 

[powderblue17]

This is the product that Apple recommends since they discontinued the Xserve Raid but I'm not sure what other products would work also.

http://www.promise.com/apple/index.html

 

[chostwales]

Thanks for this. So just to confirm:

I could represent this as one big LUN to the server. So the server would see it as one big volume. (to store accounts on)

And it should easily connect to our Mac Pro server with the SPF cables that we already have?

Thanks for this belvdr, really appreciate it.

Best,

 

[belvdr]

Yep, you got it. You might want to take a look at the Promise device mentioned above. I'm not a big Promise fan, but it could have been mistreated before our group was designated the owner of it.