How much would a SAN this size cost?

[Jeff7181]

Just curious if anyone could give me a ballpark estimate of what a 10 TB SAN with SAS drives that can provide 2-3 Gbps of bandwidth to clients would cost.

$25,000? $50,000? $100,000? $200,000?

I priced out what it's going to cost for the equipment I selected for a class project and I have no idea if I'm high, low, or about normal. Anyone have any input?

 

[RebateMonger]

I just configured a Dell (EMC) AX-150 Fibre Channel box (9TB/2-4 Gbps) for about $25K here.

But it's also easily possible to spend $100K on this, I'm sure.

 

[MerlinRML]

If you have to use SAS drives for 10TB of RAW capacity, you're looking at a minimum of 30+ 300GB SAS drives. That doesn't take into consideration RAID overhead, spares, or any device overhead (EMC needs 3 disks for their OS on Clariion arrays).

That means you're probably looking at a disk array head + 2 expansion arrays.

On top of that you need FC HBAs in each system that will access a LUN on the array, cables for interconnects, and probably a FC switch.

Also, are you sure your speed rating is 2-3 Gb (bit) not GB (byte)?

I'd wager 20-30k per disk array or expansion array, $1000 per FC HBA, switches can run anywhere from $200 to $1000 per port. Add to that hardware maintenance costs and if you need any management software. Also don't forget installation/configuration costs, if the customer can't do that themselves. Then there are infrastructure costs, unless you can assume that those are already provided - rack space, power and battery backup, cooling capacity, network ports for management.

You're probably looking around $150-200k for a safe number. I will also mention that I tend to estimate a bit high until I start getting actual quotes.

 

[Genx87]

Have any of you guys played with Microsofts iSCSI initiator? HP rep is selling us on an iSCSI setup using a box with 12 drives running Windows Storage Server 03 R2.

This is one area I dont have a whole hell of experience.

Goal is to run two front end 08 servers, clustered, using the same storage. Virtual machine container files on the SAN with each box running half the virtual machines. But if one of the boxes comes down the other box takes over.

 

[Jeff7181]

Thanks for the input... yes, I did mean 2-3 Gbit (bits, not bytes). To shed some light on things, I think I'm going to pitch an Isilon cluster for the network storage. After pricing out only the equipment and software it came to around $110,000.

If you're not familiar with that, it's a clustered storage system that's easily expandable in both capacity and performance. The implementation I'd be using is three nodes with 12 250 GB disks per node, InfiniBand backend between nodes, and GigE front end.

 

[WarhammerUC]

I just took in a 6tb netapp for 45k..

 

[cyr0nk0r]

Must it be SAN? You can get 10TB into a single Dell MD1000 DAS array for under 10k

 

[azev]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Have any of you guys played with Microsofts iSCSI initiator? HP rep is selling us on an iSCSI setup using a box with 12 drives running Windows Storage Server 03 R2.

This is one area I dont have a whole hell of experience.

Goal is to run two front end 08 servers, clustered, using the same storage. Virtual machine container files on the SAN with each box running half the virtual machines. But if one of the boxes comes down the other box takes over.

This is interesting, I always been under the impression that Microsoft Virtual Server cannot do this. I knew a few company that decided to go with ESX server 3.0 or newer because of HA and DRS functions.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: azev

Originally posted by: Genx87
Have any of you guys played with Microsofts iSCSI initiator? HP rep is selling us on an iSCSI setup using a box with 12 drives running Windows Storage Server 03 R2.

This is one area I dont have a whole hell of experience.

Goal is to run two front end 08 servers, clustered, using the same storage. Virtual machine container files on the SAN with each box running half the virtual machines. But if one of the boxes comes down the other box takes over.

This is interesting, I always been under the impression that Microsoft Virtual Server cannot do this. I knew a few company that decided to go with ESX server 3.0 or newer because of HA and DRS functions.

Microsofts Hyper V is supposed to be able to do this with clustering.

 

[cmetz]

If you read VMWare's blog, they and MS are in a bit of a fight over MS's claims here.

I would simply point out the reliability of MS's products in general, and then observe that Hyper-V is an unreleased new product line.

 

[tomt4535]

Vmware ESX Can do what you want. At work, we have 4 HP DL580's in a VMware cluster attached to an EMC Clarion. With VMware HA, if one of those physical boxes goes down, loses network connectivity, etc, the HA Agent will bring the VM's running on that box up on another box. It is like a hard reboot of the server, but it brings it back up. If you want even more HA, you can cluster VM's with MSCS(obviously windows only). You can do physical to virtual and virtual to virtual clustering. AFAIK, MSCS isnt supported in ESX 3.5 yet, but its been a while since I checked.

The EMC Clarion we purchased was around $175K for 10TB, 4gb Fiber, switches, setup and support. They set us up with 146gb 15k drives, so if you get 300gb 10k drives it would probably cost less. iSCSI might be a good idea to look into as well. Alot of the embedded NIC's in HP Servers these days have hardware iSCSI initators on them, and there are also the software iSCSI initators.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: cyr0nk0r
Must it be SAN? You can get 10TB into a single Dell MD1000 DAS array for under 10k

If I was sure 10 TB was the most they would need then no... but since it needs to be something that can grow fairly independant of the other systems in use I figured a SAN of some type would be best. It will likely be host to databases, exchange mailboxes and basic file shares.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: cmetz
If you read VMWare's blog, they and MS are in a bit of a fight over MS's claims here.

I would simply point out the reliability of MS's products in general, and then observe that Hyper-V is an unreleased new product line.

I havent dont it myself but will soon enough. Ill let you know how it works out

I have been playing with Hyper V for 3 months and have been impressed.