Hp SAN under spec?

[anything I don't mind]

We have a site with 100 users with 500gb exchange, 800gb DMS. My colleagues are in the process of speccing out an infrastructure upgrade and two of them have a disagreement about whether a hp san is adequate for the environment. One of them thinks we should go with EMC or NEtapp the other thinks that hp san should be fine. I am not sure myself as I do not have the experience to say. But based on my limited experience with SAN. Old netapp at one site with 100 users and a hp san at another with 20 users. I think hp san should be ok as long as it is FC and has fast disks.

This scenario consists of two P2000 G3 iSCSI SANs (BK831A), one at the production site and another one at datacentre.

We are looking at using FC (8 Gb Fibre Channel (2) Ports per controller, P2000 G3 Fibre Channel MSA Controller) for the production and then P2000 G3 SAS MSA Controller with 6 Gb/sec SAS (4) Ports per controller host for the DR. With a combination of 300 and 600gb 15k disks in production and 600gb 10k disks for DR.

- Do you think that a hp p2000 g3 is under spec for a 100 user firm?
- is FC overkill considering we will need 2x FC switches and then 4x FC 8gbps nic for the 4x hosts. But as hp san would be a massive cost saving FC at least for the production san will come in within budget.

I have not worked with FC myself my colleague has some experience with it and says it is completely different than Iscsi.

 

[anything I don't mind]

My colleague has visited their demo sites and we are aware of the capabilities of netapp and emc and what they have to offer and we have some of those SAN at sites. I just wanted to hear from people who have similar size sites and generally speaking if they thought based on their experience that the hp san would be adequate.

I understand that no one can give a definite answer and of course i wouldn't just go off what someone said on a forum but i just wanted to hear some thoughts on what other people have experience with under similar environments.

100 users, 500gb exchange, 800gb dms. Average usage realy.

We have another site exactly the same that runs off one old netapp with 2gbit iscsi and dual gigabit in the hosts for exchange and vmstore, as well as a hp380 g5 with a hp msa60 array with dual gigabit for dm store. That runs fine but it is starting to age a bit and is not lightening fast.

I don't cant realy see how netapp could be any faster it uses the same technology etc, i was just wondering if anyone had any insight.

 

[anything I don't mind]

That might not help much because we will be replacing the entire infrastructure including the desktops and at the moment the infrastructure is in a terrible state with a 5 high stack of old desktops in the server room running some critical functions as an example and so on. My colleague has run windows performance analysis and charted the results etc and we have an understanding of the current load. But in terms of the new infrastructure it may be a different matter entirely.

But if you are not willing to give any opinions based on experience then no worries. Thanks for the tool though will check it out.

 

[anything I don't mind]

Thanks for the help and input.

We are thinking of going with p2000 with FC for production and possibly downgrade the DR from the proposed p2000 with iscsi to a disk array like the msa 60 as it is only one host. I think the updated msa 60 is the d2600.

The question is whether we should go with hardware or software replication. If we have two hp p2000 we can buy snap addon for 1500 that allows for bit level replication. The alternative is veeam or vranger which could also potentially cost a lot, not sure how much.

Negative to going with software is that we have to use different methods to replicate the different types of data. The positive is that it is cheaper.