SANs

York · 10 Mar 2009 at 21:27

Hey Everyone,

We're currently looking into getting some new servers, and at the same time to try to virtualise as many of our existing servers as possible. To help with this I'd like to deploy a SAN so we can make use of things like the HA and live motion capabilities from VMware/Xen.

I'm currently looking at the Sun 7110/7210 (http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/7110/) iSCSI SAN to give us in the region of 2.5tb - 3tb of storage space.

The Sun kit gets some good write ups, and is capable of replication out of the box (without paying extra!) which would be handy. I'd prefer to look at more than one vendor so does anyone have any other SANs that they'd recommend? Is the Dell/HP/LeftHand network stuff any good?

John

morfmedia · 10 Mar 2009 at 21:32

I'm just installing an HDS AMS 2100 but this is a fibre solution rather than iSCSI in our implementation.

Pretty sure you can get it with iSCSI controllers. I've used lots of HDS storage before and it works well.

Netapp are highly rated by big VM users although they are pretty expensive to say the least!

iaind · 10 Mar 2009 at 22:56

I've just ordered a Sun 2510 iSCSI array, should be with me in a few weeks

I looked at a few different models, the HP arrays seem to have an iffy reputation on the vmware communities, the EMC and NetApp were much more expensive which I couldnt find a good justification for. The other one's I looked at were Hitachi SMS, but apparently you cant change the disks in them!

Ev0 · 10 Mar 2009 at 23:37

We've just installed some Equallogic (Dell) san kit, seems alright

bigredshark · 11 Mar 2009 at 10:56

Netapp, EMC and HDS are all very reputable. HP and Sun are both reasonable lower end choices and I've used both without issues - the HP EVA boxes aren't uniformly popular though.