SAN Comparison's - What do you prefer?

[StarsFan4Life]

I was handed a task by my VP of IT last week to perform some comparisons of different SAN systems. Our company is looking to go the VMware route and looking to consolidate from around 50 servers down to 4-6 SAN's.

We are about to drop a great deal of money on this project and want to make sure we get things right on this. Here is a list of the different models we have selected to choose from:

* Lefthand Networks Models B2120 & BSTRB

* Sun Microsystems Model ST6140

* Dell EqualLogic Model PS5000XV (We had the pleasure of them coming and dropping one of these off last week so we could demo it, pretty freakin sweet).

Now, I would like to know if any of you actually use these systems currenty or have in the past. If so, what are some pro's vs. con's about them?

We run a 4TB emails storage system with only about 400 users (yes, I know) and about 15TB in total of file storage throughout our company. Both of these are increasing at a rapid speed. Any help with this would be greatly appreceiated!

Ben is awesome!

 

[RebateMonger]

Sorry, I haven't used any of those.

But I have a question. I'm always intrigued how folks do backups of such large storage systems. Care to fill me in? Thanks! RebateMonger

 

[StarsFan4Life]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Sorry, I haven't used any of those.

But I have a question. I'm always intrigued how folks do backups of such large storage systems. Care to fill me in? Thanks! RebateMonger

Lot's and lot's of tapes...

 

[SolMiester]

15TB of Data, OMFG!, you have got to be kidding.....you need like 1st, 2nd, 3rd tier archiving.....LOL. Is the 4TB mail system an e-mail archiving system?..

Oh, I have no experience in those SAN's, too expensive for my company!!

Good luck!

 

[Brovane]

My Company just uses Dell so I can only speak from the Dell side. We currently have in production a CX3-40 with Brocade Switches with around 40TB of raw storage capacity. I also have a AX100 tied into the fabric for T3 storage. We also have a AX150i storage. I have always been happy with there service for our storage. We have been using Dell SANs since 1999. We currently have a 2 SQL Clusters, 1 Exchange Cluster, 1 F&P Cluster, 3 Dell R900 VMware ESX 3.5, 1 VMware VC cluster and 3 standalone servers all hooked into the SAN fabric. From the fabric channel side I have been very happy with VMware on the SAN. That being said I don't have much experience on the iSCSI side. The AX150i is iSCSI but it uses SATA drives which are not high performance. Unfortunately when we bought the CX3-40 series they didn't have the combo unit yet. If you are doing iSCSI I would make sure that you have a good switch in your data center running things. Did you look at the new CX4 series SAN's? Is Fabric channel out of your price range?

For backup we use ML6020 tape library with LT0-4 tapes which backup 800GB native our 1.6TB with compression. The library has a capacity for 120 tapes and 6 tape drives. We don't even have ours filled to capacity with tapes and we have plenty of storage capacity. Each of the 6 Tape drives is hooked directly into the Fiber Channel fabric. Depending on the server we can usually backup at the rate of 1.2GB Min to one tape drive back hauling over the network.