SAN hunting

[randomlinh]

has anyone gone through this? So far I've seen offerings from compellent, lefthand networks, and dell/emc. The first two seem rather interesting, especially lefthand's "network raid" idea. Granted, our current backbone wouldn't be able to support it.

However, we're still in limbo on whether or not the cost will be justifiable. Our services are getting to the point where a SAN seems like the best technological solution, but the bottom line is always the budget.

Basically, does anyone have any suggestions that would be easy to grow? we will be getting 1TB of raw storage most likely, and then growing from there. The main reason is more that we are starting to host more servers, in blade form, and in virtualized form. a san seems like it would really help in data management.

A friend of mine laughed at the cost these guys want, but his solution is basicaly xserve+xsan. I am going to look into it's features and what support apple can offer, but figured I'd get more input here too.

Thanks
Linh

 

[spidey07]

Look at Dell/EMC/HP offerings. I'm sure they would have an "all in one" solution that would fit your needs.

As far as justifying it? You can do the full fledged analysis, but generally it pays for itself. I believe current trends are for data/storage needs to double every two years.

 

[MysticLlama]

I have a small network, so I just went with the MSA1000 from HP. It scales to 6+TB and you can get in for less than $10k without drives.

It doesn't have all of the features of the mid-range to high-end models, but it works great for small applications, I haven't had any trouble with it, it's inexpensive, and it's really easy to use. If you can use the array configuration utility, you can use one of these.

 

[ktwebb]

We have a couple of Shark ESS 800's, a Clariion and a DMX, and a teir two solution from 3Par. Stay away from the Shark but we're happy with the other solutions. The cost is justified easily if you have the need and Blades with VM's is easy justification. That's a prime reason to have a SAN onsite. We run 5 fully populated IBM BladeCenters, with all VM's running off SAN LUNs

 

[alent1234]

check out Hitachi, HP SAN is really a rebranded hitachi

for only 1TB of raw i would look at something from HP or whoever is your server vendor since you should be able to have one management software for everything

 

[spyordie007]

So you can make best use of the new asset be careful to do an analysis of what your needs are before buying, there are a lot more components to consider than just the SAN itself (i.e. switches, HBAs, etc.). We've got a number of customers who went and bought "cheap" SANs (i.e. EqualLogic PS300s) and are running into performance issues now and ending up sending a lot of good money after the bad to try and fix things after the fact. If you dont have the resources to do this internally consider having a 3rd party come in and do it for you.

Some questions to ask:
1. How slow is reasonably slow for seek times (7200 SATA may be cheap but the seek times are low)
2. How slow is reasonably slow for throughput (with a lot of iSCSI implimentations you wont see much more than 100MB/sec to any one server)
3. How much extra load is okay to put on the servers (iSCSI pushes a lot of network traffic, than can be offloaded but can quickly become more expensive if you want to impliment good multi-port iSCSI HBAs)

Also keep in mind if you want to put a bunch of VMs on it you'll have multiple VMs contending for the limited bandwidth so make sure there is going to be enough to meet your forseeable needs (most of the time I find it's better to spend an extra $10k today than $50k next year).

 

[JDMnAR1]

We started out with a Shark, went to Xiotech Magnitude, and are now using Magnitude 3Ds.

 

[bunker]

What's the application?

Are you looking at fiber channel or iscsi?