SAN Options

Also, one question.

what is the need to move away from your current system, other than support costs ??

Are you seeing any issues, performance or stability, or support, or even capacity ??

Would the cost of the purchase of, and training for a new system be greater than the support renewal ??

I believe 3020s are EOL now, so renewing support may not be an option any more...
 
Also, one question.

what is the need to move away from your current system, other than support costs ??

Are you seeing any issues, performance or stability, or support, or even capacity ??

Would the cost of the purchase of, and training for a new system be greater than the support renewal ??

I haven't seen the numbers involved but I've heard from a few places that once you run out of support on SAN kit, it gets VERY expensive and is often cheaper to buy a new SAN than to extend support if it's even possible as Bigredshark says...

Give HDS a look too, good storage at a good price point. Not sure on models at this amount of storage.
 
I haven't seen the numbers involved but I've heard from a few places that once you run out of support on SAN kit, it gets VERY expensive and is often cheaper to buy a new SAN than to extend support if it's even possible as Bigredshark says...

Indeed. The vendors want you buying new kit.

As years go by they also get harder to support. More parts fail, more support calls due to old version of software, more customers trying to get old arrays working with new features, etc.

Typical life of this kind of hardware = 3 years. Maintenance extension to 5 years is common but expensive. Maintenance 6 years+ is horrificly expensive and very rare.
 
To second Daz I'd have a look at Suns Open Storage (S7000) range of SANs. From what Oracle have said it seems to be one of the few storage devices that Sun sell that they're very keen on developing and pushing :)
 
Just had one quote on a pair of NetApp 3100 series heads and its coming in roughly around 150k. However, this is the RRP price and it also doesn't include any new storage. We have HP coming in today to have a chat about the HP EVA series and see what they can offer us. I need to arrange a meeting with EMC as to compare their offerings as well. Does any one recommend any good resellers for EMC?

Also on a interesting side note, the film Avatar was redendered using Blue Arch filers as they have excellent I/O performance.
 
I would stick with netapp purley because you know how it works and are happy with it in your environment. Don't forget the end of the financial year is approaching and netapp traditionally offer some tremendous discounts of you can get the sale through this side of the cut off. the last company I worked for also got some massive discounts when upgrading and consolidating by trading in our existing out of date filers. Push them hard on price they generally have plenty of lee way.
 
Just had one quote on a pair of NetApp 3100 series heads and its coming in roughly around 150k. However, this is the RRP price and it also doesn't include any new storage. We have HP coming in today to have a chat about the HP EVA series and see what they can offer us. I need to arrange a meeting with EMC as to compare their offerings as well. Does any one recommend any good resellers for EMC?

Also on a interesting side note, the film Avatar was redendered using Blue Arch filers as they have excellent I/O performance.

If you need any BlueArc sales people i can pass your details on to someone i know who works in the EMEA Sales lot.

Heres the avatar/bluearc press release btw: http://www.bluearc.com/storage-news/press_releases/pr_100106-avatar.shtml
 
Just had a meeting with a vendor about the HP EVA solution and within the first 5 minutes of the meeting HP has been ruled out. It doesn't support all the tools that’s we have become accustom with. Yes it does support snapshots and that’s about where the comparisons end against the NetApp it offers very little in terms of application support like we have no with the Snap Mirror, Snap Manager tools for example.

We have also been advised that Blue Arch solutions are really all about high I/O's and doesn’t really have the NetApp feature set.

Also another plus point is NetApp seems to have simplified the options you have when you buy the products and broken it down so that’s another bonus. However, NetApp do offer a discount on the application packs for the NetApp 2000 series but that’s not a huge help to us as a 2070 NetApp filer would be a step down in terms of performance and the current 3020c is on the limit of its current IOPS performance.

The current favourite at the moment is a clustered pair of NetApp 3140's with a possibly PAM Shelf and a combo of FC and SATA disks to replace the Store vaults we have at the moment as well.
 
It basically boils down to a few options in my opinion -

- Netapp / EMC are excellent all round but are fairly expensive

- HP / various others are good enough at the basics and reasonably priced

- 3PAR / Pillar / Others are very good in some niche applications and can occasionally be a better option than Netapp/EMC at a favourable price too

If you want something our of left field, look at HP's (acquired) lefthand networks 'brick' storage product. It's really innovative and might be the future of low end SANs (particularly for use with virtualisation).

I've been told pretty much the same thing from a number of suppliers. However, EMC are more costly when it comes to renewals then NetApp.
 
I've been told pretty much the same thing from a number of suppliers. However, EMC are more costly when it comes to renewals then NetApp.

Remember you'll also have to retrain with the EMC kit. All does the same stuff but different operations.

At the bottom of EMC quotes they give the cost fo the next years maintenance. So if you bought an array with 3 years maintenance it would give you the cost of the 4th for your records.

PS - Remember SSDs > PAM :)
 
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