Blade infrastructure and servers

[Max Sorokin]

From customer experience, what Blade server storage method is rather reliable, convinient and secure: Blade server OS runs from SAN (EVA) or OS runs from their internal disks?

[Oleg Koroz]

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/solutions/solutions-overview.html

[Albert Austin]

It depends a lot on the investment a customer is willing to put into their IT environment. I personally would advise SAN environment though more expensive, I feel its more reliable. For ex. On a blade server running on internal disks only RAID 1 is possible.

Albert

[David Claypool · Accepted solution]

Albert, it's actually RAID 1+0 (Striping and mirroring). In practice, most implementations don't use RAID 5 (parity) because although it is more economical, it does take a performance hit. RAID 5 volumes are almost exclusively used for things like log files.

Also, although it is no longer offered, the BL40p was a Xeon 4p server that featured 4 HDs and supported either RAID 1+0 or RAID 5. The newly announced BL480c support 4 small form factor SAS drives in RAID 1+0 or RAID 5, and with an upgrade can support RAID 6 (advanced data guarding).

[Albert Austin]

Thnx for that info David.
I should have been more clear with my above reply that I was referring to BL 20's and 35's as I havent had the chance yet to deal with the 40's or 480c models.

Albert

[Max Sorokin]

Thanks for your time.
It is not necessarily, that SAN solution is more expensive. For ex. BL 20 with internal HDD would cost even more than BL35 with SAN HDD (if we compare same performance CPUs). Though, some might see some additional server features in BL20 that are not found in the BL35, not everybody really need those features. I can agree that in the SAN environment server HDDs (ether internal or external) are generally used for RAID 1+0, that is, only for server OS, but DB or APP data is stored on the external disk arrays.
In my situation server HDD (ether internal or external) will be used purely for OS. As far as I am concerned, will there be any reasonable functional difference between these two solutions (not taking in account financial issue).