Few SAN Questions.

[K.C. Leblanc]

I'm looking into SANs for work. A few Qs.

How do people get round the SAN switch being a single point of failure?

Who's kit do you recommend (we're quite big on HP, but I'd like to consider other options)?

How much better is Fibre Channel then iSCSI?

 

[K.C. Leblanc]

Cheers for the help guys.

Does anyone know of any manufacturers who make a stroage array that can be upgraded from iSCSI to Fibre Channel.

 

[K.C. Leblanc]

There's a few cunning questions missing from this whole discussion....

What's your budget?
What applications do you run?
What's your required throughput (IOPS)
What functionality do you want from the kit?
How much storage do you require now and how much do you envisage needing before the end of the kit's lifetime?

Sadly we're not at that stage yet. At the moment I just want to get a bit of basic understanding. Mostly so I can plant the right big numbers in the ICT manager's head.

We're hoping over the next few years to visualise our servers and want to use a SAN to hold the images.

However until we know what we have to spend I don't know what we can do.

The reason I asked if there were any array that supported both iSCSI and Fibre Channel was because we might start off with the array only attached to one physical server. In this situation the outlay for two FC switches might be something that could be delayed until the second server was brought online.

Thanks for everyone's input. Don't worry about suggesting expensive kit, I work in education, so the pricing doesn't necessarily correlate to what you'll find in industry.