SAN's - Who Has Them

Okay then, So here it is:

Who here has a SAN at their site, How much did it cost and was it difficult to setup?

I had a guy from RM shoot me down last week because 'Did i have $20,000 to spend on a SAN? NO!!! so i don't think your going to do that, Go along with my RM NAS Box idea...Which...Oh...Wait....Doesn't take user home directorys'

Im sure some of you have them so I would love to hear what you got and costs etc A) To solve the problem of space and B) So I can say to my Boss that RM guy was talking out of his arse.

Thanks Guys and Girls

Barry

I dont have a SAN but im looking into getting one. I know Ric has one as does DMcCoy I think. I think for the basics though based on a sata system your only looking at about 6k I think. Then about £150 for the servers you want to connect them to.

As long as you go down the iSCSI route as opposed to Fibre Channel, the costs are a lot less than people think. Also iSCSI is now virtually as fast and virtually as reliable as FC. Reading the Enterprise section of PC Pro shows quite a few iSCSI devices appearing and getting good reviews too. The real beauty of iSCSI being that it runs on conventional ethernet cabling instead of expensive Fibre & the associated FC switches.

We have a SAN RAID array connected to our blade servers- IBM DS4000 - the device was about 3k with another 1.5k for the disks. It seems to work OK - though it has "dropped off" a couple of times, which required a full powerdown. Also - it is not very flexible with regard to sizing - partitions have to be attached to each server, and once set and sized - they cannot be easily changed - which will be problematical later on.

We current have a home grown NAS device but I am looking at a SAN for future use. It's the way ahead I think. Simply upgrading your servers as needed whilst the information stays intact in the same place make a huge amount of sense.

I have an EMC AX100 - cost about £2K with 3x 146GB Disks (which I plan to add to year after year - one of the best reasons for going down the SAN route). The Fibre cards for each server were just over £100 IIRC and the switch was about £1.5K.

I would definately recommend looking into SANs - your disk space can then be used much more efficiently and shared between servers with ease.

Don't confuse NAS with SAN either. A NAS box won't host your SQL databases for example - SAN gives you block level access which means that it is as if you have the disks in the actual server!

I just got a Dell 1.5TB Iscsi SAN (based on EMC ax100) for about £6k (including 6xNic and GB switch) and makes our NAS 160gb box look like a dinasour with loads of room for expansion. It takes a little while and head scratching to setup but my servers have space once more.

Nice to hear you input guys, Sorry i went a bit dark on this, Been super busy + 1 staff member down due to illness.

SAN's i think are the way forward too...I hope to see a SAN solutions in the school i work at soon as i think it would benefit them more than just keep buying really expensive RM Servers (<Makes me sad)...The battle against RM Brainwashing continues...

Thanks

Barry Leonard

Just stuck my Dell/EMC AX100 in this morning sexy piece of kit with the looks to ;-) Mines equipped with 12x 250GB SATA disks

we are now looking for a storage solution, SAN seams to be the route we want to take.
Anybody implemented SAN storage int he last 12 months? I am interested in seeing what flavours are being used in the education market

I installed an EMC\Dell Ax150i (iSCSI) SAN during the summer. I rate it quite highly, although you really need to get someon who knows what they are doing when installing it as the documentation is very lacking. I currently have about 3TB sat in there and all working through a L3 managed GB switch. I run quite a few virtual PCs off it very easily.

I'd buy the latest iscsi revision of the EMC CX300 (CX300i or something I think)

I suggest you throw a good 20-30k at it.

Edit. Maybe the CX3-10 or CX3-20

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Face-Man

I just got a Dell 1.5TB Iscsi SAN (based on EMC ax100) for about £6k (including 6xNic and GB switch) and makes our NAS 160gb box look like a dinasour with loads of room for expansion. It takes a little while and head scratching to setup but my servers have space once more.

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You was robbed Faceman. The AX100 is complete crud. For that money you could get a proper iscsi or FC array, albeit without the capacity.

Agree with DMcCoy, best to throw a good 20-30K at the problem. The clariions are great products but they don't represent best value for money.

With a 25K budget I could get a LOT of IBM kit for the money, whereas I'd be lucky to get a fully populated clariion CX3-10 with software come in under budget.

Do note the date of the posts though. Prices have come down quite a lot in some areas with more SME products appearing. Whatever I bought, I'd make sure it was on the vmware esx hcl.

I have an adaptec snap server 520 with 2TB storage (1.5 when formatted/raided) which is set up via ISCSI - so is a SAN in essence.

I'd say it has been a great investment. Fast, stable etc... The only problem has been if a server that is using a partition on it crashes then it can lose all the share details suddenly.

That cost us about £3k. If we had spent another £3k we could probably have gone full out FC SAN.