WHAT did I just BUY on Facebook Marketplace??

[jakkuh_t]

 

[emosun]

without watching the video , i assume it smells like cigarettes based on anything i've ever looked at on marketplace

[filpo]

Finally, something Linus can’t drop 

 

(Stairs are typing…)

[finkn]

It appears like linus did his homework and explained enterprise IT stuff relatively accurate. bravo

[Dutch_Master]

I'm already anticipating the sequel: Linus converts his free SAN to Win-11 and plays Doom3!

[Nystemy]

I myself at one point managed to buy a second hand "fiber network switch", carried the thing home and only then realized that it weren't for Ethernet/IP, but ISCSI. My disappointment were rather immeasurable and the day were ruined. But at least it were so dirt cheap that I honestly couldn't even complain since it were still interesting in its own right. But since then I always act more carefully around anything fiber related. However, then there is the cheap vendor locked NICs on the market that all are so alluring, yet a complete waste of money unless one has a system from said vendor... _{(I guess the stereotype of a dragon's hoard isn't too unrealistic in my case, what can I say, I like tech...)}

 

So I wouldn't be surprised if a whole cabinet of storage like this would be 500 bucks, seems in line with how these sorts of things deprecate in value.

[Mister_Magister]

He doesn't know what he's talking about, iscsi is literally tcp/ip same as nfs, literally first result in google, and no iscsi is not SAN it's still NAS

[Josh732]

As a SAN admin at an S&P 500, this was a blast to watch! Extra note on the battery in the controller module: It is, as stated in the episode, for maintaining written data in the RAM on the controller, in the event of a power outage. However, there's also almost certainly going to be some local storage on the controller (on some of our low-end SAN systems, it's as rinky-dink as an SD card) for the RAM cache to be flushed to, so that no data is lost, even if the power outage lasts longer than the cache battery.

 

Also, I'd be pretty surprised (but not completely shocked) if the system they bought doesn't support SATA drives – definitely worth a try.

[dvdkon]

19 minutes ago, Mister_Magister said:

He doesn't know what he's talking about, iscsi is literally tcp/ip same as nfs, literally first result in google, and no iscsi is not SAN it's still NAS

iSCSI is very different from NFS. First off, it's a block-level non-shared (on a standard FS) network storage protocol, where NFS is a file-level protocol "emulating" a shared filesystem. Second, iSCSI runs on IP directly, NFS runs on TCP or UDP, which then runs on IP.

[Josh732]

13 minutes ago, Nystemy said:

I myself at one point managed to buy a second hand "fiber network switch", carried the thing home and only then realized that it weren't for Ethernet/IP, but ISCSI. My disappointment were rather immeasurable and the day were ruined. But at least it were so dirt cheap that I honestly couldn't even complain since it were still interesting in its own right. So I wouldn't be surprised if a whole cabinet of storage like this would be 500 bucks, seems in line with how these sorts of things deprecate in value.

That sounds like it was a Fiber Channel switch, rather than iSCSI. A switch meant for iSCSI would still function as a normal Ethernet/IP switch, whereas Fiber (or Fibre) Channel is a different layer 2 (from the OSI model perspective) protocol, so you'd have a difficult time (I'm hesitant to call anything "impossible") running IP traffic over it.

[poochyena]

ngl, I'm still kinda confused why he bought it. I had a hard time understanding him explaining why its *generally* useful, vs why he *personally* finds it useful.

[Josh732]

17 minutes ago, Mister_Magister said:

He doesn't know what he's talking about, iscsi is literally tcp/ip same as nfs, literally first result in google, and no iscsi is not SAN it's still NAS

In the industry, iSCSI is very much considered SAN and not NAS. The two (competing) protocols that are supported by most SAN gear are iSCSI, which is often considered more "entry level", and Fiber Channel (or often spelled Fibre Channel, but you'll see both), which is a different layer 2 protocol, built specifically for use in SAN's.

 

The most cut-and-dry distinction between SAN and NAS is that SAN provides block-level storage and NAS provides file-level storage. 

[maskmcgee]

"big penis server" what

[Josh732]

10 minutes ago, poochyena said:

ngl, I'm still kinda confused why he bought it. I had a hard time understanding him explaining why its *generally* useful, vs why he *personally* finds it useful.

I think he realizes there's every chance that this video was all the value he'll get out of the purchase. However, there's also a chance (sounded like he's hopeful of this too) the slots in the drive enclosures (what he referred to as the JBOD's) will support SATA drives and can be populated with high-density SSD's. He could then slap an iSCSI HBA or a converged network adapter (or potentially a pair for redundancy) into Whonoc (sp? and whatever iteration) and add a bunch more capacity to the server that way.

[Dada216]

to the "enterprise people" who watch LTT, wouldn't you LOVE to see LTT do to the vendors we deal with what they do to Nvidia/AMD/Intel and all the rest of the gaming space?

I know I do, and, hear me out, they are probably the only company in the world in the position to pull that off.

 

granted, given the imprecision they had in the video I'm referencing in the title they would definitely need some host/people who know their enterprise stack much better than Linus/Jake do* but I think there's more than a few small/medium/big company (sizes are relatives) sysadmin/it director/managers who could do that for LTT, I think we might be a community that would engage with them if they were to target us specifically.

 

to LTT and Linus specifically, would you think this is a business opportunity for you guys?

I mean Linus talked on the WAN show how they realized their audiences comprises of a bunch of different people who watch LTT for a number of reasons. Here I am, I don't game, I don't care about Graphics cards, I watch almost every video they put out because I'm into tech in general, so there's probably a segment of LTT audience like me, who work for big companies and deals regularly with the "enterprise stack" that already watch you.

And let me tell you guys at LTT who are hopefully reading this, we move a lot of money, we are consulted/have inputs for budgets in the multimillion dollars per year and we deal with IT vendors all the time, mosty of us (?) are also very passionate about tech and this stuff, and I really think we would greatly benefit from having people like you review the vendors in that space and their products, in depth, like you do for the stuff the gaming space, follow the market, what's happening, what's coming up, what's new, etc. etc.

 

* not that they did a bad job, not at all, and I understand the audience they were targeting there.

Edited June 11, 2023 by Dada216
added tags

[Dada216]

I just opened a thread, specifically for this (first time on this forum I didn't realize there was a discussion thread for each video).

 

wouldn't enterprise people who watch LTT absolutely LOVE to see LTT media group do to the vendors in our space what they do to the vendors in the gaming space?

[Dada216]

1 hour ago, Josh732 said:

That sounds like it was a Fiber Channel switch, rather than iSCSI. A switch meant for iSCSI would still function as a normal Ethernet/IP switch, whereas Fiber (or Fibre) Channel is a different layer 2 (from the OSI model perspective) protocol, so you'd have a difficult time (I'm hesitant to call anything "impossible") running IP traffic over it.

he almost certainly got a fabric switch, which, as you correctly assumed, it's almost impossible to get IP/TCP/UDP stuff running through it.

you can definitely do IP-over-Fiber tho, and that's what they already did in their previous video with networking gear with fiber ports, but that is very different from a fiber channel fabric for SAN access.

[madseason]

:-D

 

[leadeater]

@LinusTech @jakkuh_t You should have (just kidding) asked me since we're one of, maybe the biggest or was at one point, Netapp customers in my country.

 

FYI NetApp is not hardware RAID, that's wrong. NetApp is nearly identical to ZFS (to the point they had nerd fights with each other over who stole what). Those batteries are for the NVDIMM in the controllers. The controllers have NVDIMM as well as read cache cards (now NVMe SSDs for read cache).

 

The RAID Groups are "vdevs" and the RAID Groups (vdevs) are added to Aggregates which are the same as ZFS Pools. For simplicity sake you can literally think of and talk about NetApp as if it were ZFS and you'd be 80% or better correct.

 

All those JBODs are missing their second IOM module (SAS interface controller) which makes the JBOD fully redundant and you could lose up to 3 PSUs without loss of access to any disks in it (SAS disks only!).

 

Overall C- on the technical details 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Mister_Magister said:

He doesn't know what he's talking about, iscsi is literally tcp/ip same as nfs, literally first result in google, and no iscsi is not SAN it's still NAS

SAN typically refers to block storage which is iSCSI. iSCSI is a block storage protocol over TCP/IP, you provision and present LUNs to iSCSI initators (servers basically). The Initiator system is the one that formats and creates the filesystem on the LUN and not the storage array. 

 

NAS is file storage or network file systems like SMB or NFS, these the storage controller creates the file system on the storage volume.

 

You don't have to take my word for it though, here is a NetApp system showing SAN configuration and iSCSI

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Josh732 said:

However, there's also a chance (sounded like he's hopeful of this too) the slots in the drive enclosures (what he referred to as the JBOD's) will support SATA drives and can be populated with high-density SSD's

They can 

 

Once you take the NetApp controller out of the equation they are just SAS disk enclosures with nothing special about them at all. Since SAS is compatible with SATA it just works but only the primary data path, no dual pathing and redundancy supported so in larger bay count enclosure you need to connect both data ports and half the disks will show on one cable and the other half on the other cable. Unless it's a much bigger enclosure with a SAS expander but then that's getting in to details most here don't need to be hit with unless they ask.

 

All you need to use these is a SAS card with external SAS ports and you're good to go.

[Needfuldoer]

Sounds like the Lab is just a storage server and a gross of hard drives away from having its own Mother Vault...

[themrsbusta]

Years ago a server like this would take an entire room, now is a rack. How many years to companies have servers with similar size to a Raspberry Pi and performance/storage of a today's rack?

That's why I love tech.

[dogwitch]

1 hour ago, themrsbusta said:

Years ago a server like this would take an entire room, now is a rack. How many years to companies have servers with similar size to a Raspberry Pi and performance/storage of a today's rack?

That's why I love tech.

still a long while.

[nhand42]

Worth mentioning that enterprise is slowly moving away from SAN towards object storage. I don't expect SAN to disappear anytime soon, in fact it'll probably continue to increase in absolute terms, but object storage is growing even quicker and replacing traditional models dominated by SAN.

 

SAN will continue to innovate and improve, and there will be niches where SAN dominates forever, but it's no longer the pinnacle of storage like it was 10 years ago. Many enterprise architects treat it as dinosaur technology, and rightly so.