Choosing SAN questions

[RobFuller]

I'm in Essex using 2x Oracle 7110 units as SANs for Hyper-V Cluster so if you want a closer look PM me.

Fifth'd or Sixth'd support for Oracle Sun S7000.

I haven't got time to write everything I'd like to say, PM me with a contact number if you'd like to chat.

• You get the whole software stack and all updates in the price. NetApp and most of the other big players will gouge you when you want to buy a new software licence (£10k for NFS, not kidding).
• The hardware is enterprise-grade (redundant components, clustering support, etc.).
• The Fishworks interface is the big one for me - usability on most SANs (NetApp and EMC spring to mind) is something of a nightmare, Fishworks really couldn't be easier.
• DTrace = Awesome.

Happy to talk sometime, spent a lot of time trying to work out what was best for us, already had a NetApp FAS2020, went for a S7410.

Chris

[gshaw]

Sun \ Oracle has a lot of fans by the looks of it

Is there some kind of odd channel distribution for these as no reseller or storage \ virtualisation company mentions them at all (and I've had aboout 5-6 meetings now with some big players in the market)?

[Poco]

Hi Gshaw,

Sun as far as i remember is only allowed to be sold by approved sun resellers from approved distributors. on top there is a severe low margin if i recall correctly so making them a not so popular item to be sold from a reseller point of view. this was some time ago that i looked at it so the info may be outdated now though

[Duke]

Is there some kind of odd channel distribution for these as no reseller or storage \ virtualisation company mentions them at all (and I've had aboout 5-6 meetings now with some big players in the market)?

They've only been out for a couple of years in their current format (Sun have done storage for quite a while after they bought out... a company who's name I can't remember years ago) so the S7000 range itself hasn't been around as long as names like NetApp and EMC, even if the components of S7000 have been (Solaris, DTrace, storage servers, the JBODs).

I think Poco's right about the approved resellers, although most of the companies I've spoken to have been willing to supply S7000 stuff if I've wanted it. If you're looking for a point of contact, talk to Andy Trevor @ Cutter Project (linescanner on here), or Andy Paton @ WTL (apaton on here).

When S7000 started to get popular I think it scared some of the bigger names in this price-range. NetApp just couldn't compete on the licensing front and started to try to scare Sun users with the ZFS/WAFL lawsuit (which is now over).

[nicholab]

I don't have a San but from the stuff I have seen I would go with Sun/Oracle route in schools or go with a whole system VM system based round an Intel modular server.

[teejay]

Yes, most of the big boys will sell you Sun stuff, but they don't get the same 'incentives' as they do from the other SAN manufacturers so prefer to sell you the other stuff. You'll be amazed at how the core brands in the SAN area will fight for your business ;-)

[Poco]

now that is very true. all of the brands will fight for your business aggressively over 10k and sometimes under 10k. more for the fact of having their brand out there so places like this spread their name.

[gshaw]

I think a full-fat SAN with the dual heads \ controllers (whatever your preferred terminology is!) is the safest pair of hands to give to the virtual environment. N+1 hosts gives the room to breathe for failover so probably sticking with that route.

I still don't trust Hyper-V, end of the day I don't want Windows running underneath as my hypervisor

There definitely seems some aggressive marketing going on out there, some of the events I've been on must've been sponsored by the SAN manufacturers and have to admit it nearly worked until I stick the product names into here \ Google!

[john]

They've only been out for a couple of years in their current format (Sun have done storage for quite a while after they bought out... a company who's name I can't remember years ago) so the S7000 range itself hasn't been around as long as names like NetApp and EMC, even if the components of S7000 have been (Solaris, DTrace, storage servers, the JBODs).

I think Poco's right about the approved resellers, although most of the companies I've spoken to have been willing to supply S7000 stuff if I've wanted it. If you're looking for a point of contact, talk to Andy Trevor @ Cutter Project (linescanner on here), or Andy Paton @ WTL (apaton on here).

When S7000 started to get popular I think it scared some of the bigger names in this price-range. NetApp just couldn't compete on the licensing front and started to try to scare Sun users with the ZFS/WAFL lawsuit (which is now over).

Highly recommend The Cutter Project and Andy for my SAN Needs, they have supplied both my current 7110 and my new 7120 (due any day now!!) Others are willing to supply but the pricing is nowhere near as good as Cutters. I know Andy is away / has been away so if you've dropped him a PM I don't think he's been picking them up being on holiday but I am sure he will catch up ASAP (Kmount I am sure will ensure he knows he's being talked about in good ways!)

[Iain.Faulkner]

We've had the Hitatchi SANS in place now for about 15 months....unfortunately they have not been as reliable as I would have liked. We have 2 SANS in place and both have been replaced and then the replacements have also had to be replaced (faults with drives and power supplies). The user support leaves a lot to be desired as well...take for instance the last two replacements we were sent, both were incorrectly configured with the wrong number of drives, as a result it was impossible to use their data migration tool and we had to wait for another replacement to be sent through to us.

[Butuz]

Hitatchi (used to be IBM) deskstar PATA/SATA drives earned the name "deathstar" over a 10 year period of constant faliures.

Buy a hitatchi san at your peril IMHO.

Butuz

[gshaw]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

[Duke]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

Heard of them but never had any experience with them personally. They're not a name that usually comes up at a school-level of doing things, but that doesn't automatically mean anything. A quick glance of their site suggests they're very much SAN-only as opposed to the unified storage Sun/Oracle do and the multi-protocol offerings of NetApp and EMC. If you just want VMware support then there's nothing wrong with iSCSI, but personally I prefer NFS and having full NAS (CIFS) support means I can point Windows users directly to my storage. Why have a virtual machine running Windows to present shares as a storage server whose back-end is the SAN, when you can just let them connect directly to the SAN/NAS and bypass the VMware + Windows overhead?

[gshaw]

Ye true, was thinking the same as our Windows Storage server has been a right pain at times with AV, Windows Updates etc. Do you use NFS for your VMs at all? It's something I've seen a few people doing these days, just wondering how widespread it is amongst people's installs here...

[torledo]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

from what i remember Sun used to [may still do, haven't checked] sell a range of DAS/SAN storage which were OEM'ed from Dothill.

Like a lot of SAN vendors, Sun also sell storage based on the popular LSI logic midrange products [although it wasn't merely a case of sticking a Sun label on, there would have been i imagine a fair amount of Sun value added]. IBM and others do likewise with the LSI stuff. And IBM have some of their own interesting products higher up the midrange you go.

As always it boils down to how much you have to spend. The S7000 certainly seems to have shifted the goalposts as far as bang per buck with multiprotocol storage, but i think it'll always be the case that you have those who like to stick to certain brands.