Opinions on small SAN

BruBoy

BruBoy

BruBoy

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Hi All

I'm looking to move my local storage onto a SAN (for three hosts).

Performance isn't that critical, I have around 4Tb of data on around 30 VMs (ESXi 5 / vSphere) that we mostly use for software development & testing. We want to use gigabit ethernet initially.

We've been pointed in the direction of an Equallogic PS4100E - does anybody have any experience of using this (or closely related) machines?

We've been quoted around £10k for a PS4100E 12x1Tb NL-SAS box - is that good value? 3.5" format is good as we can pull some of the 15k SAS drives we have from our servers and reuse them in the SAN.

Thoughts / alternatives welcomed.

Thanks

BB
 
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Might as well drop to the PowerVault MD3200i, it will offer more than enough throughput (our live infrastructure runs on one).
 
We used to use the Equallogic smaller units and apart from some of the drives in one particular enclosure seemingly failing quite a lot they were pretty good units and did the job nicely.
 
We have the PS4110 which is a 10GbE unit with 25x600Gb 10k HDDs, paid £25k just for it. Runs well but the two controllers run active/passive which isnt great but the Dell ESXi image comes with the specific EQL storage drivers. Also, you can only have up to two PS4000 units in a group so bear this in mind if you want to expand later.
 
EMC VNXe

Why not look at the industries number 1 storage for VMware?

**edit**

Have you thought about future growth? scaling with EQL isn't overly kind on your pocket, of course the story is add more nodes/members for performance but as you've said performance isn't important so why pay more?
 
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danielanthony said:
How much are EMC storage devices? I was under the impression that their price per TB was quite high
Click to expand...

Real world solutions starting at £7k with VNXe.

Common misconception is that we are expensive per TB/expensive in general, this was true once upon a time but we are now more in-line with the current market and why wouldn't you want to look at a storage solution with the most industry awards :) o yea and we own VMware, other companies laughed at EMC when we acquired them, have a Google for some news articles around the time we bought them. We have the best integration with VMware, again confirmed by different independent analysts such as Gartner, IDC, Infopro etc etc, anyway I could go on and on.

Customers buy from us because they trust our vision and because we deliver time and time again, EMC are an execution machine!
 
If performance isn't critical, maybe look toward a NexSAN box. Does what's needed for a small solution. Suports both iSCSI o/ GbE and FC for connectivity.

They're generally a lot cheaper than the likes of EMC and Equallogic, and from what I've seen, performance is decent enough for the money.
 
icehot said:
EMC VNXe

Why not look at the industries number 1 storage for VMware?

**edit**

Have you thought about future growth? scaling with EQL isn't overly kind on your pocket, of course the story is add more nodes/members for performance but as you've said performance isn't important so why pay more?
Click to expand...

^ If you're implying EMC there you might want to take a look at Tintri before you start crowing :)
 
Hi All

Thanks for the various replies - plenty to think about and varied opinions just as I expected!

I'd heard a few bad things about NexSAN but most people have heard a few bad things about most of the vendors...

Will get a couple more quotes and keep you posted.
 
Yeah you will hear bad things about anything, unfortunately. Though reviews are supposed to be helpful even in the enterprise market areas often they're subject to 'fanboy' loyalties and personal bias.
Not to mention there's a lot of people out there who's competancy is somewhat questionable to say the least. Particularly with iSCSI, because there's so many different ways to set the underlying network of the SAN up, many people end up with a sub optimal setup. But through ignorance blame the kit. If I had a £ for every benchmark/review/blog whinge I read on the internet where I could see glaring flaws in the method I'd have that Les Paul gold top I want :)

Most of this stuff they'll give you a demo unit (especially now as a lot of them are close to year end/ end of quater and are pushing for sales). The only thing I base my R&D on is what I could get the demo unit to do based on what I'll actually be using it for.
 
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Just as a followup to my previous mention of Nexsan. My boxes just turned up :) Got some ATTO numbers off it.


http://i.imgur.com/SbpgD.png <- Dell R710's Internal Array compared to iSCSI attached Nexsan SATABoy2 (at the top end it hits ~100MB/s per gigabit path which for onboard NICs might be making them creak a bit, so there may be more grunt still if I had more SAN facing NICs or 10GbE)

I might post some more off the second box later with different RAID types, stripe sizes and number of host NICs. Made the mistake of straight away creating a 7TB RAID6 on this one, which took 6 hours to initialise, so I'm not nuking and re-doing that just for some benches. I'll do those on smaller arrays :)
 
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