Cost effective (read: cheapish) SAN for virtualization?

[Kona*]

Hey

Most of our customers are running Dell EqualLogic SAN's and we use Openfiler in house however one of our customers is looking for something between those two extremes. Initially they would like to host two of their DC's, one DNS and one DHCP server spread across 2x Dell R710's, the servers have already been quoted for and agreed on however the EqualLogic we quoted for is too expensive for them. Does anyone have other suggestions? Ideally it needs to be up-gradable to support mirroring/replication in the future and it must be iSCSI. I've heard good things about the Overland Storage SnapSAN S2000, has anyone got an opinion on them?

Thanks!

 

[Kona*]

This thread lists some contenders

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18279061

Thanks for the link, I'll check them out

I love the two we have, simple to set up, decent throughput, and easy to configure mirroring between two units.

Surprised you said you are using openfiler for virtualization though, seeing as it doesn't support persistent reservations.

That's encouraging to hear, I've got someone from Overland giving me a call on Monday to talk about the available options so I'll see what they say

As for Openfiler not supporting persistent reservations, the current available version doesn't, no. However the new beta does (available on their IRC channel) although we are not running beta software in a production environment, we have a cluster support subscription with them for another customer and it's labelled as v2.9 which Openfiler installed (and it supports persistent reservations) - this is the version we use in house. It works really well for us, not really had any problems