SAN Advice - Urgent

iaind · 26 Apr 2009 at 10:20

I've seen HDC (Hitachi) mentioned before - I had a look at their SMS line and was told by the supplier something odd.

They said that they either come with a full compliment of 146gb disks or a full compliment of 300gb disks etc. Apparently if you want to expand, you cant swap disks or add a second tray, you need to purchase a new unit and pay an engineer to come in and replicate the data onto the new one...... :confused:

Dont know how true that is but it put me right off

K.C. Leblanc · 26 Apr 2009 at 16:23

iaind said:
I've seen HDC (Hitachi) mentioned before - I had a look at their SMS line and was told by the supplier something odd.

They said that they either come with a full compliment of 146gb disks or a full compliment of 300gb disks etc. Apparently if you want to expand, you cant swap disks or add a second tray, you need to purchase a new unit and pay an engineer to come in and replicate the data onto the new one......

Dont know how true that is but it put me right off

Sounds likely, I read a review for one and it said the disks were non removable. If you had a disk failure you had to swap out the whole unit. Although Hitachi would do an advance swap out so you could copy your data over. Sounds like a lousy design.

iaind · 26 Apr 2009 at 17:51

why the hell would anyone design a SAN like that? sounds ridiculous!

morfmedia · 27 Apr 2009 at 19:52

iaind said:
I've seen HDC (Hitachi) mentioned before - I had a look at their SMS line and was told by the supplier something odd.

They said that they either come with a full compliment of 146gb disks or a full compliment of 300gb disks etc. Apparently if you want to expand, you cant swap disks or add a second tray, you need to purchase a new unit and pay an engineer to come in and replicate the data onto the new one......

Dont know how true that is but it put me right off

Yup their very low end kit (think its the SMS100) isn't scalable.

Their mid and high end kit is awesome kit though. Just installed two AMS 2100 FC arrays and they are running sweetly with a mix of VMWare, SQL servers, Oracle Clusters etc etc.

Last place I work had about 200TB of HDS storage and it was very impressive.

SlightOC · 28 Apr 2009 at 20:20

Yes I can confirm the SMS100 suck as does HDS support, but I was forced to buy it cos it was cheap.

Deathwish · 28 Apr 2009 at 20:52

morfmedia said:
Don't rule out HDS kit. Installed a AMS2100 recently, very good kit.

This. We have a HDS AMS2100 FC and its doing the biz.

Stelly · 29 Apr 2009 at 02:56

We use NetApp and even though my misses does work for them I couldnt recommend them enough, and all the women are smoking there

Stelly

iaind · 29 Apr 2009 at 07:49

A woman who works for a SAN company full of other smoking women? surely not... where can I find one?

RSR · 29 Apr 2009 at 09:02

Stelly said:
We use NetApp and even though my misses does work for them I couldnt recommend them enough, and all the women are smoking there

Stelly

Agreed.

Another NetApp user here. I am very happy with them to be fair even though there not the cheapest SAN on the market.

For STS replacation NetApp IMO are one of the best.

Andy

Stelly · 29 Apr 2009 at 21:17

iaind said:
A woman who works for a SAN company full of other smoking women? surely not... where can I find one?

It was hard, believe me... its a great company, I get lots of interesting info and VM that use their technology to play with

Stelly

p.s. they grow on trees in my garden

Will Gill · 30 Apr 2009 at 16:50

Vanilla said:
Neither the MSA or the equalogic is enterprise. It is low end. In fact the MSA was made bt the server division of HP, not the storage division.

you sure about that?

the msa1000 in beta was based on SBB storageworks drives and MA8000 controllers (hsg20/21's), sure they move forward to incorporate the smartarray chipset but that was to promote DAS to SAN, was definitely still the digital swx team and not compaq proliant orientated. or if you like white/blue box alpha storage developments, akin to ma6/8000, esa8/12/16000 and later the eva/xp1024 platforms.

msa is definitely not an enterprise class solution but nor is it low end, its aimed at the emerging SMB customers

Vanilla · 30 Apr 2009 at 18:07

Will Gill said:
you sure about that?

the msa1000 in beta was based on SBB storageworks drives and MA8000 controllers (hsg20/21's), sure they move forward to incorporate the smartarray chipset but that was to promote DAS to SAN, was definitely still the digital swx team and not compaq proliant orientated. or if you like white/blue box alpha storage developments, akin to ma6/8000, esa8/12/16000 and later the eva/xp1024 platforms.

msa is definitely not an enterprise class solution but nor is it low end, its aimed at the emerging SMB customers

Ahh, I thought it cam eout of the server division! I know that the MSA2000 today is an OEM dot-hill box.On the grand scale of the storage I would definately put it at low-end and no higher. Nothing wrong with that - as you point out it's where it is aimed even though in defense of SMB I do see quite a few starting on some mid range SANs.