Cheaper SAN storage

Dusty:

that's a good price did you get any software packs with that? Is that standard support?

JonRohan:

if budget it tight do you really need the IOPS of SAS? With 12 SATA drives you'll get around 700 to 840; I've been told if being conservative discount the IOPS of the RAID-DP drives, which NetApp will have two, assuming you have one disk group and one aggregate.

We have a NetApp S550 in our Dutch office running on six 1Tb SATA drives: 5 virtual servers (Windows shares via native NetApp CIFS shares) serving around 50 users. No complaints from them

I'm sure you could get cheaper (esp thinking about Dell) but in my small amount of SAN experience (only known NetApp and old EVA 3000s) I'd say NetApp are a premium product

cheers

Zz
 
I would rather go with SAS as currently there are three DB servers and I probably will be adding a few more. Plus 5-7 virtual servers, with more additions in the next year.

I don't need a huge amount of storage and certainly don't want to run out of speed later on down the line.

I have managed to find some much better pricing in the US. As the company I work for imports a lot of goods I should be able to import stuff from the US efficiently.
 
Oh and NetApp comes with de-dupe on primary storage, you should get a lot of space savings, I've seen nearly 80% space saving on our test LAN data store and average 40% for others.
 
JonRohan said:
I would rather go with SAS as currently there are three DB servers and I probably will be adding a few more. Plus 5-7 virtual servers, with more additions in the next year.

I don't need a huge amount of storage and certainly don't want to run out of speed later on down the line.
Click to expand...

fair point over spec'ing speed isn't a bad thing :)
 
I just think it would be easier to justify new space down the line than a new SAN because of performance issues. I could always buy a cheaper SAN or storage in a few years for less important stuff if required.
 
my disk shelfs are FC connected to the NetApp head, and then gigbit connected to the network. No matter what drive type you have, it got a 1Gbps limit on the network.

I'm not trying to sell you anything, but I think you are trying to overspec & out price yourself for 60 users.
 
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you can bond your SAN NICs too, 2020 has dual NIC's per controller giving you 4 in total so 2Gb/s per controller.

Also getting a switch that supports LACP (though you could go for static etherchannel) means you'd get decent load balancing and fail over on each bonded pair. Super high availability would be cross stacked switches as well but that does cost!

I've gone for VLANing on the vifs (NetApp's virtual virtual interface) to further separate different types of traffic, keeping iSCSI and storage NFS on separate, private VLANs (our primary 3140 has 6 NICs)

FYI we're moving our Global Oracle ERP system from 4Gb FC to dual gig eth NFS
 
The Sun Storage 7000 range offered us cheapest per/GB recently. (last year)

We bought a 7310 with about 44 disks, they are pretty good for a SATA iSCSI setup, great value compared to HP EVA or Dothill that we also use for Tier 1 type storage.
 
Sun stuff is great, make sure you get one with plenty of cache for the best performance. That way the SATA drives barely even do any work.
 
Well after a week of getting prices looking at technical papers I'm none the wiser. lol.

I've been working with Dell who reckon we are using around 350 IOPS and 9MB/s throughput currently across our four servers and that we could safely go SATA with 8 or 16 250 GB drives and have enough room for exchange and MS SQL in the future. This still doesn't sit too well with me TBH. There price wasn't bad at 18k CAD.

Meanwhile HP hare looking to drop there pants on a left hand SAS starter kit which will be around 5k more than Dell's SATA SAN but IMO offer much better performance, plus I'll have two units separate units. This is around 25K CAD.

Anybody see any real issues with SATA or am I thinking along the right lines? SATA could screw me in the future, or am I being a little over the top in using SAS?

TIA
 
SATA SAN has got much better in the last couple of years and will probably be fine for your needs, but I'm not sure about 250GB disks, as 500GB platter (1TB) drives would be faster and not really cost that much more. 8 Drives are too few if you're planning to use it for multiple apps that use different ways of writing to storage. e.g SQL might want its own pool of disks because of the way it writes log files etc.

And it really all depends on how big your future SQL needs might be, if you've only got a a few small DB's, then SATA will be fine, but if you have a massive DB that you're running reports from all the time, then you'll probably want SAS for performance.

Exchange 2010 is meant to be better in the way it uses storage compared to 2003/2007, as our HP guys says SATA would be fine when we were enquiring.

For ref, we use Dothill SANs and Sun 7310 devices here, we are getting a HP 6400 EVA in a couple of weeks with both SAS and SATA drives.
 
Sorry to dig up this thread again.

I'm pretty much at a decision making stage between a Dell Equallogic PS4000 iSCSI san wtih 16x 450 SAS 10k or an EMC AX4 with 8x 450 and 4x300 SAS 15k.

What would you consider the better SAN? I like the look of the Equallogic but prefer the overall package containing the EMC (it will come with HP servers, HP switching etc). EMC seem to be a little more responsive and have more literature than dell and I like the fact I can mix and match drives if required. Shame I have to pay a bundle for the snapshots etc with the EMC.

I'm using VMWare if this makes a difference.

Thanks,

Jon
 
JonRohan said:
Sorry to dig up this thread again.

I'm pretty much at a decision making stage between a Dell Equallogic PS4000 iSCSI san wtih 16x 450 SAS 10k or an EMC AX4 with 8x 450 and 4x300 SAS 15k.

What would you consider the better SAN? I like the look of the Equallogic but prefer the overall package containing the EMC (it will come with HP servers, HP switching etc). EMC seem to be a little more responsive and have more literature than dell and I like the fact I can mix and match drives if required. Shame I have to pay a bundle for the snapshots etc with the EMC.

I'm using VMWare if this makes a difference.

Thanks,

Jon
Click to expand...

Is there a big price difference between the two?
 
They are virtually the same price, maybe 1-2k difference at most. They do have a different amount of disks. The equallogic has 12x 450 10K SAS and the EMC 8x450 SAS 15k and 4x300 SAS 15k.

There are some minor differences between the packages whether that's a slightly better CPU on my servers, slightly better switching etc.
 
Hi.
Personally Id go with the higher disk count as a starter to avoid more spend early on in the life of the storage system...but the EMC offering looks very good - also depends on how good the support is for this kit in your area and what the expansion and ongoing costs will be.
 
This disk count is an interesting matter. The Equallogic uses 2 hot spares leaving me with 14 disks (still a greater capacity than the EMC). EMC will allow one global spare. The EMC will also allow be to use SATA drives in the same unit.

EMC were really trying to sell the snapshot feature to me advising that they use snapshots more efficiently than dell and thus using less space. TBH I'm not sure whether this is sales bumff or fact (probably the former).

Dell are coming to see me today so I'll have the opportunity to take a good luck at the SAN etc. My heart is leaning towards the EMC / HP kit as I prefer HP.

Support wise I do not know who would be better.
 
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