Blade with SAN

[matt40k]

Hi,

Can someone recommend a good blade system which can have a SAN array, ideally Fib. rather then ISCSI, however I'll look at ISCSI solution.

Also like the idea of Xen, however I do like the sound of VMware aswell.

Backups will be done to tape, end of. I need to archive them off.

Space is a premium, so is power.

Any ideas of exact models etc?

[Geoff]

What are you intending to do with this blade system?

[matt40k]

Hosting a lot of big databases... long story.

[Geoff]

What size do you expect these databases to be? Also will you be doing any processing of information in the database on the blades?

[matt40k]

Max of 5GB DB size per DB with about 50 of them. People will connecting up and running everything on server side.

[CyberNerd]

we have a DS3400 and and IBM bladecenter with HS21's

IBM System Storage DS3400: Overview - IBM System Storage
IBM BladeCenter HS21

[matt40k]

Cheers, did like how IBM gives you the HP equivalent

[john]

We have a HP C3000 Blade Centre, 4 BL460 Blades and a HP MSA2000 3.6TB SAN, running VMWare on the blades for all the nice features of it and it seems great, were still pilot running our new network ideas on it at present and testing the VMWare features such as load balancing, auto restart on other hardware in the even of host failure etc but all is going very well.

Last month was a good time to get HP Blades as you got the chassis costs refunded when you bought 4 blades.

I know we are happy with it as its just working great