@jim9500 said in New IT update 60TB / 60 mil files / 20 people - HP Equipment:
Hey guys, thought I'd get your input. Our org has grown and I'm needing to double our internal production server capacity. We are currently running an HP DL360 G8 / Windows Server 2012 Standard / P822 / 3 D2600 + 36 HP 3TB SAS drives (MB3000FBUCN) configured in raid 10ADM (3 drives per set).
I'm getting horrible benchmarks on the random read MB/s access with CrystalDiskMark RND4K Q1T1 (3.73 vs 2780 sequential). This server stores about 30 million files ranging from 50kb - 10MB and the full storage capacity rotates probably 2 - 3 times a year as we process these jobs then move them to cold storage.
Forget 2.5" HDDs. SSDs has killed that market with huge performance improvements for the same or lower price. And much higher reliability.
Where magnetic media reigns supreme is large storage arrays using 10+TB 3.5" HDDs. Best price per TB for this technology.
SSDs have moved on to the NVMe interface for performance reasons but there are still legacy applications for SAS and SATA SSDs.
Don't know how much storage you need at what speed, but you'd get the best out of both worlds with a mix of 3.5" HDDs and SSDs (preferable NVMe).
If you're using an external SAS enclosure, put the SSDs in the server and the HDDs in the enclosure. That way you'll minimize the performance drop. SSDs will otherwise saturate the SAS links.
If you want to go all SSDs, you might want to go for SATA if you want lots of them and want to put them on a raid card. Current pricing is about $170 per TB for Samsung's value enterprise SATA and also their NVMe drives. There are few SAS SSDs available and they cost more. If you buy from HP (or Dell) expect to pay 2 to 3 times as much.
As a comparison 3.5" enterprise HDDs are below $30 per TB.
As for drive sizes, SSDs will usually get cheaper per TB as you go bigger up to about 8TB or so. Fewer drives are better than more drives so go as big as you need.
For 3.5" drives the point of diminishing return is 16TB. There are larger drives but they are not as cost effective and can be hard to find.