Inspiration! It what brings us together to achieve great things. Home Labs! Great way to use resources and gain lab time on products while working on my own schedule!

At Varrow yesterday we were given the inspiration and support to build out our own home labs. I as a storage engineer really need one. With VSA’s from Isilon and VNX, it will give me the opportunity to test things before going to customer sites, try out crazy configurations and really get to know something while accomplishing a sort of frankensteinish lab in the process.

EMC PLEASE RELEASE THE VMAX VSA

Sorry Had to do that…I am primarily a Symmetrix Engineer so it would be nice to have one running at home…so in the interim for my lab, I bought a storage array that looks like one! Only it is very small, weighs a couple pounds and only supports 2 x SATA drives. A D-Link DNS-320 NAS Array!

To top off my EXTREME infrastructure I needed to upgrade from my old 100MB switch to some full on 1000MB. I went with the Cisco SF 100D-08 8 Port Small business switch.

Server/CPU I’m going to followup in a week or so after Turkey Day….

Old:

New:

Here are some shots of the internals, hard drives, etc:

Before Hard Drives…they just slide right in:

Here it is with stuff plugged in:

Here it is, plugged in BLUE LIGHTS SHOWING on top of my Dell GX620 (MythTV database box which I’ll probably mention later):

Performance from my Ubuntu Linux box connected directly to switch, NAS connected to switch… Not bad considering the NAS is a single 1GB link and it only cost about $99, a fraction of the cost of a VMAX 🙂

Here it is using IOZONE w/ 5 threads of 500meg files with a 64k record.

“Output is in Kbytes/sec”

” Initial write ” 17733.74

” Rewrite ” 17288.42

” Read ” 26911.20

” Re-read ” 29090.55

” Reverse Read ” 23024.59

” Stride read ” 98985.24

” Random read ” 1982285.77

” Mixed workload ” 1157524.75

” Random write ” 8258.36

” Pwrite ” 17066.91

” Pread ” 26523.35

So there you have it! Pretty Cool eh? Oh and did you spot the Roomba? His name is Carlitos…he keeps my office clean from harmful particles to my extreme vSphere 5 Home Lab.

-sangeek