SANs - Where to start?

brainchylde · 11 Jun 2010 at 08:55

PR. said:
Doh, wish I'd seen this thread earlier!

Currently looking at getting a SAN as we want to use it for storing Data Protection Manager 2010 backups, probably going to need about 5TB to backup everything was looking at the Equallogic P4000 (the basic) as 90% of the data it's going to receive is coming through 800k/s broadband lines!

Very price concious and I'm still waiting for our reseller to give us a price, I'm betting it's going to be too expensive

Do you have multiple DPM servers? If not, just wondering why you even need shared storage?

NightShadow · 11 Jun 2010 at 16:16

PR. said:
Doh, wish I'd seen this thread earlier!

Currently looking at getting a SAN as we want to use it for storing Data Protection Manager 2010 backups, probably going to need about 5TB to backup everything was looking at the Equallogic P4000 (the basic) as 90% of the data it's going to receive is coming through 800k/s broadband lines!

Very price concious and I'm still waiting for our reseller to give us a price, I'm betting it's going to be too expensive

We are looking at 1TB SATA in RAID10 for 6TB storage and currently pricing is coming in around £17,000 +VAT per PS4000E, plus support on top of that.

Yamahahahahaha · 11 Jun 2010 at 16:30

NightShadow said:
We are looking at 1TB SATA in RAID10 for 6TB storage and currently pricing is coming in around £17,000 +VAT per PS4000E, plus support on top of that.

Off the top of my head you might be better off with an MD3000 DAS unit.

Certainly doesn't sound like you need break-neck speed (Not that the MD3000 is a slouch in that regard).

NightShadow · 11 Jun 2010 at 17:20

The SAN is going to be used for multiple servers including file servers and Exchange and will be replicated between 2 geographic locations, hence not using DAS. If it was solely for Exchange 2010 I would go for DAS as DAGs are great and wold be all I need!

PR. · 11 Jun 2010 at 21:27

brainchylde said:
Do you have multiple DPM servers? If not, just wondering why you even need shared storage?

Issue is we are going to have about 15 spare HP servers, anyone of them could be a DPM server but they all lack sufficient space for enough disks. I guess if we can buy a server with enough expansion space for cheaper than a SAN that would be the way to go!

walnuts · 11 Jun 2010 at 22:32

PR. said:
Issue is we are going to have about 15 spare HP servers, anyone of them could be a DPM server but they all lack sufficient space for enough disks. I guess if we can buy a server with enough expansion space for cheaper than a SAN that would be the way to go!

Have you looked into DAS for one of your current HP servers? This would give you all disk space you would need and should be cheaper than SAN.

When we needed extra disc space for one of our Dell servers we bought Dell PowerVault with 15 hard drives.