Advice needed SAN or NAS

[demon-knight]

I'm after some advice, basically we budgeted for a new SAN and some servers to replace our old ones, long story short they cut our budget from 50k to 10k.

Out of this I need either a SAN or a NAS with at least 10 to 15tb of space and any other ancillaries.

Our network currently consists of an old NEC SAN that is end of life and it has around 8tb of space and is connected to a brocade switch.
The SAN is used with vmware and hosts around 28 vms and a few luns for staff/student work.

The plan is to reuse the 6 servers that run the vm's and move over to Hyper-V, this is the easy bit believe it or not.
We have around 2000+ students and around 550 staff.

So the question is what can I get for 10k or under that would best suit my needs?

[localzuk]

In simple terms - no. £10k is simply not enough.

A HP MSA P2000 with FC, and 24 x 600GB SAS2 drives (which is what I'd look at for your needs) would come in at around £18.6k. HP have a 50% cashback offer on the array itself at the moment, so that brings it down to about £14k. You *might* be able to get a deal if a supplier requests preferential pricing which might knock it down a grand or 2.

So, £12k - £13k minimum.

[demon-knight]

You totally echo my thoughts there, problem is we need to do something as the san is on its last legs and they are adamant that we cant have anymore despite my protests...

[localzuk]

If you went for the lower end of your space needs, then you might just about be able to hit that target - and you'd have 5 or so drive bays spare which you could add to next year to increase the size of the array.

Your best bet is to speak to some IT suppliers and see what they can do with your requirements, then post their results here for people to look over.

[tmcd35]

Have a word with someone like Novatech and see if they can bespoke build a solution for you. I bought a 4Tb array a couple of years back (16x450Gb 15k SAS) for around the £7.5k mark. You might need to look at installing Linux to manage the array and provide iSCSI support but it could work.

Failing that Buffalo do Terrastations with Windows Storage Server 2008 and iSCSI support but they'd be dog slow using commercial SATA drives

[broc]

You might get a DELL PowerVault MD3220i with 24x 600gb SAS disks for £10k or thereabouts

[localzuk]

Have a word with someone like Novatech and see if they can bespoke build a solution for you. I bought a 4Tb array a couple of years back (16x450Gb 15k SAS) for around the £7.5k mark. You might need to look at installing Linux to manage the array and provide iSCSI support but it could work.

Failing that Buffalo do Terrastations with Windows Storage Server 2008 and iSCSI support but they'd be dog slow using commercial SATA drives

As he's got an Brocade switch, I'd've suggested sticking with FC rather than iSCSI myself.

[rodent43]

We are currently using these

Qsan - making data smart - iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SAS, SCSI, JBOD, RAID Controllers, and iSCSI IP SAN Cabling solutions.

They are in a lower budget but they are working for us...we had the same issue last year moving to a new system so we have two qsan, one for share/files etc and one for hyper-v cluster

they have worked well so far, multiple options for connections

I have had a couple of disks report read warning but our support just ship us another drive...

[deano]

Have a look at the release of Server 2012 as it allows for live migration and high availalability by simply using a server/s with 3.0 SMB shares. No SAN required

[mrbios]

Why don't you split the file storage and VM storage on to separate SANs? That way you don't have to buy lots of stupidly expensive drives. Keep your current box for your file storage buy a new box to move your VMs on to, tier the storage rather than just filling it with lots of expensive SAS drives and move your VMs on to the appropriate tier for the IOPS required?

[Dos_Box]

Ring ICT Direct and see if they can help you. They often get in used SAN and NAS boxes and will warranty them as well.

[demon-knight]

As he's got an Brocade switch, I'd've suggested sticking with FC rather than iSCSI myself.

We have 2 of these but im open to suggestions.

Have a look at the release of Server 2012 as it allows for live migration and high availalability by simply using a server/s with 3.0 SMB shares. No SAN required

Been looking at 2012 for a while, looking forward to testing it a bit.

Why don't you split the file storage and VM storage on to separate SANs? That way you don't have to buy lots of stupidly expensive drives. Keep your current box for your file storage buy a new box to move your VMs on to, tier the storage rather than just filling it with lots of expensive SAS drives and move your VMs on to the appropriate tier for the IOPS required?

I thought of that but we cant rely on the SAN as its flakey.

[demon-knight]

Has anyone seen/used one of these?

QNAP TS-879U-RP 10GbE NAS Server

[tmcd35]

As he's got an Brocade switch, I'd've suggested sticking with FC rather than iSCSI myself.

Hadn't noticed that - still I was looking at the £10k budet...

Have a look at the release of Server 2012 as it allows for live migration and high availalability by simply using a server/s with 3.0 SMB shares. No SAN required

Interested in that myself - We are currently running Win2k8R2 on our NAS. Need to upgrade the Host Servers to 2012 as well though, not sure I fancy doing a live Windows update over the top of our main storage NAS with all our live data on. I have backups but this sort of thing makes me kinda nervous!

[demon-knight]

Interested in that myself - We are currently running Win2k8R2 on our NAS. Need to upgrade the Host Servers to 2012 as well though, not sure I fancy doing a live Windows update over the top of our main storage NAS with all our live data on. I have backups but this sort of thing makes me kinda nervous!

Don't blame you, I wouldn't fancy doing that either. What sort of speed are you getting with your nas at the moment?

Im quite lucky in some respects as we currently have vmware on the old stuff and for the new stuff im setting up mostly new vm's on Hyper-V so I can run side by side for a while.

Am liking the look of this after reading the review of that new qnap here