Cheaper SAN storage

I thought Dell sold EMC kit? They seem to be pushing Equallogic more at the moment so may persuade you more that way.

The Equallogic guy that we had in recently was telling us about how efficient their snapshots are compared to the rest and how there is no performance hit etc etc so you have to take it all with a pinch of salt!
 
You are correct, Dell do sell EMC kit, however in this instance Dell were selling the Equallogic units and another vendor were selling EMC.

I've decided to go completely with Dell and have purchased an Equallogic box with 16x 450 SAS drives with all the server and switch bits. Looking forward to it. :D
 
We took a load of Dell kit.. not sure how I missed this thread or I could have pointed you in the right direction. We are very happy with it. We have a VM Cluster with a Dell Equallogic PS5000 SAN. It has 16* 1TB SATA drives (7.2k I believe). The VM cluster is 3 * Dell R710, 108GB RAM, 63GHz Processing power. The Cluster runs 30VMs currently (mixed Server 03, 08, Ubuntu), all situated on various volumes on the SAN.

We also have exchange 2k7 for 5000+ users in our VM Cluster (2500 very light usage, 1000 light, 1000 medium and the rest high usage), with an PS5000 Equallogic box for storage. We have not virtualised domain controllers or database servers. There are varying opinions on whether or not this should be done - we have chosen not to mainly because our database usage is high. But also because we don't really need to.

It also has a file server which gets fairly high usage - we use a Raw Mapped LUN within a Server 2K8 Virtual Machine. Works very well.

We went through an extensive process prior to having the SAN - lots of performance monitoring to determine our true IOPS requirements. Dell determined we required 494.
We plan to invest in a second unit at some point in the next 12 months.

Remember to invest in some decent VM backup software too - we use vRanger.

Hope you enjoy your kit - ours has been fantastic!
 
Hey,

Thanks for your post, it is most reassuring. We were using around 350 IOPS minus a NAS box and a Windows 2000 av server in which we didn’t evaluate. I'm pretty happy that we've got plenty of room to grow into our box. It is overkill for us to have SAS but I had the budget and figured we'd be better off with it long term. I will be adding three VM’s off the bat to the cluster.

Do you mind me asking what RAID you are using on your SAN? We will have three VM hosts connecting to the SAN with 2 x hosts serving production environments. I was planning to use RAID 5 with the two hot spares.

I was planning to use VMWare's backup system, would this be a mistake?
 
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JonRohan said:
Hey,

Thanks for your post, it is most reassuring. We were using around 350 IOPS minus a NAS box and a Windows 2000 av server in which we didn’t evaluate. I'm pretty happy that we've got plenty of room to grow into our box. It is overkill for us to have SAS but I had the budget and figured we'd be better off with it long term.
Click to expand...
Yes - for us the capacity was most important. Hence we went for slower, but larger drives. I also had the knowledge we could invest in another box later (which as I explaned we will be doing). We will probably go lower capacity but higher speed in this box.

JonRohan said:
Do you mind me asking what RAID you are using on your SAN? We will have three VM hosts connecting to the SAN with 2 x hosts serving production environments. I was planning to use RAID 5 with the two hot spares.
Click to expand...

We are running RAID 50 with 2 hot spares.

JonRohan said:
I was planning to use VMWare's backup system, would this be a mistake?
Click to expand...

I can't comment as I've not used it. Obviously the most important thing is it works. We had a number of recommendations regarding vRanger and it is fantastic - you can do file level recovery from a vmdk which, for us, is very useful. It's also flexible and easy to use.
 
Thanks again. Raid50 must be nice. :D.

I've used vRanger a lot but was already topping my budget and therefore am hoping the VMWare backup works....
 
I'd throw the IBM DS3300 (iSCSI) or the DS3400 (FC) into the mix. Good deals out there and reasonable resilience too.

SATA drive will reduce your IOPS performance as they tend to be 7200RMP compares to 10K or even 15K RPM for a SAS/FC drive. IOPS is generally a function of number of spindles and rotational speed of those spindles and is critical for database performance/virtualised workloads. MB/s (throughput) is less critical (usually)

Dave
 
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