SanMelody and SanSymphony

oddjob62

oddjob62

oddjob62

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Has anyone had any dealings with DataCore's products? Good? Bad? It has been put forward as a cheaper alternative SAN solution. I have heard of it in the past, but not heard and "real life" reviews.
 
Cant comment on those products, but I've had good success with OpenFiler on test networks. The price is right too (free!), although you can pay for support if you need it
 
iaind said:
Cant comment on those products, but I've had good success with OpenFiler on test networks. The price is right too (free!), although you can pay for support if you need it
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I've used openfiler in the past (also on a test network). Whether it's suitable for a corporate environment i'm not sure...
 
Personally, I'd put OpenFiler with a support contract (1000eur/year) on a par with SanMelody etc in suitability terms. Its got a lot of nice enterprise features and its nice and simple.
What are you looking at spending and have you already got the hardware?
 
iaind said:
Personally, I'd put OpenFiler with a support contract (1000eur/year) on a par with SanMelody etc in suitability terms. Its got a lot of nice enterprise features and its nice and simple.
What are you looking at spending and have you already got the hardware?
Click to expand...

No hardware yet. Our previous SAN stuff was from Dot Hill, but my boss is looking at other options (credit crunch and all that). Since we need to buy the hardware, a DAS full of drives+Server+Openfiler will probably be no cheaper than getting something like an MD3000i that has everything in one package.

Basically the main reason why i'm asking is that my boss was contacted by a reseller saying they could get us a "cheaper" DataCore option. I'm assuming they will get a server, stick SanMelody on, and charge us for something i can easily do myself.
 
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I cant imagine it being any cheaper than a proper SAN if you're considering paying a third party to set it up.
I just ordered a Sun 2510 iSCSI array, dual controllers and PSUs, 12 x 146gb 15k disks for circa 5k, which really isnt much more than a server with that many disks.
The 7110 might be worth looking at as it's based on a standard x86 server but preconfigured with Solaris as an iSCSI box. List price with 16 146gb SFF 10k disks is over 8k but you should be able to get a good discount on that. Cant vouch for it myself, but I do have the server it's based on (the x4250) and the quality is top notch.
 
We had SanMelody running on our network, no complaints. Worked a treat, although Dell won the contract in the end and supplied us with CX300's for the same price. A decision we all regret, they have our balls in a vice.

Recently aquired another company and we installed 2 8TB san units (failover) using openfiler, costs us <£5k each using kit bought off the shelves. They have been running for two months and their performance via ISCSI thrashed that of the existing CX300's which use FC. That said they are running more spindles, at £150 for an enterprise SATA disk versus £300 / 500 for a FC disk in the EMC units the SATA option allows much greater versatility.

You can buy enterprise class 12 disk enclosures on the web or build them yourselves. If you have an abundance of old servers look into the controlers that terminate on the external side of the case. We used two old hp storage works chassis.

IT budget has been cut by 40% this year. Keep things running they tell us.
 
Looks like we'll probably be going with a couple of MD3000i units in the end. We can get a decent price from Dell as we get most of our hardware from them (plus we are a charity)
 
I'd spend the money getting support from Sun and just use the iSCSI target on ZFS in OpenSolaris. Cheaper + more reliable.
 
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