We have a large physical campus with our own fiber everywhere which means we can do things like stretch clusters very easily.
I have a bit of an issue with paying huge premiums for proprietary vendor storage hardware (Netapp/EMC etc.) so have been looking at what we could do with storage as software but with tier one hardware and software.
Right now we have hardware HP P4000 split across 2 sites with 10GbE and a third witness site on 1GbE.
Our IOPS is very low (< 2000 @ 95th percentile) and our read/write ratio is 92/8 across everything.
We currently present iSCSI to the ESXi hosts and large volumes are presented directly to the guests via in-guest iSCSI.
My current plan is to spec up a pair of ML350's each with 16x3tb nearline SAS drives in RAID10 and a couple of SSDs.
I then plan on using HP SmartCache on the SmartArray to make the SSDs available as disk cache.
I then plan on running 2x HP Storevirtual VSA on each box (I need 2 to get the 20tb of capacity that I require).
The Storage Network would be 10GbE with 1GbE as standby adaptor.
Thoughts?
I'd love something unified that also offers NFS but there seems to be very little out there that is software, offers NFS and iSCSI, and that does proper failover/synchronous replication if you drop a node in two sites (that doesn't cost Netapp Metro Cluster money).
(The current hardware comes off lease in around six months which is driving this as it's the natural time to look at options).