SAN SUPPLIERS

[alan-d]

I'm possibly in the market for a new SAN as one of the dual controllers has died on ours and can't be replaced without replacing the whole thing (less the drives). So before I do that I'm looking at moving away from the current manufacturer (Dot Hill) to one that is a little more reliable and can support the replacement of parts for more than 3 years!

 

Roughly, I'd be looking for, as a bare minimum something on the lines of;

 

30TB of disk space made up of 20TB SAS drives and 10TB SATA drives

2 x Dual 10GB Port controllers (iSCSI)

Allows for expansion in the future

Is VMWare compatible

 

Any recommendations on suppliers to approach?

Any recommedations on models to avoid?

 

Thanks

[RTFM]

I know @Millgate does SAN's and was competitive when we were looking to purchase both our SAN's

 

What I would say though is that NetApp is brilliant

Edited April 24, 2013 by RTFM

[SYNACK]

Are you looking to rehome the drives, might be able to transfer them to the new unit with new caddies.

[Domino]

We've recently moved almost all our SANs to EMC VNX and are very happy so far - but depend show much you're willing to drop.

 

I will say, if you're looking at HP, avoid the MSA 20xx range and start at least at the 23xx range for the amount of drives you're looking at. The p4500s are also a very good bet from them, but a bit further up the price scale.

 

Based on anecdotal reports from lots of people I'd also avoid the Oracle SANs - since they bought them off Sun there's been some very unhappy people about. but I've not used them myself.

Edited April 24, 2013 by Domino
spelling fail

[Millgate]

Hi Alan,

 

As RTFM says, we deal with Sans. I'll put something together for you now

[pantscat]

I've heard some very good things about Nimble SANs - saw a couple of product demos in the autumn and the performance was amazing.

 

I'm going to look at those next year when my Netapp is due for replacement.

[RTFM]

We've recently moved almost all our SANs to EMC VNX and are very happy so far - but depend show much you're willing to drop.

 

We looked at EMC when we were deciding but when we asked for a demo they said they couldn't as they used a NetApp and hadnt moved over yet.......was slightly worrying!

 

I think the new EMC range was just out at the time though. Everything we had seen of it we liked just not being able to get a demo wasn't great.

Edited April 24, 2013 by RTFM

[alan-d]

Are you looking to rehome the drives, might be able to transfer them to the new unit with new caddies.

 

I have the option of buying another Dot Hill SAN and transfering the drives across and hope they work, or getting rid of Dot Hill altogether as our main SAN. After transferring the data across I was thinking of using the old SAN for a test\backup environment where failure of the remaining controller won't upset as many users

[alan-d]

We've recently moved almost all our SANs to EMC VNX and are very happy so far - but depend show much you're willing to drop.

 

Apologies for being stupid but what do you mean?

[Domino]

Gah, no I apologise for my awful typing...my excuse is I posted in a rush.

 

should read "depends on how much you're willing to drop" - as in, they're pretty pricey

[alan-d]

Gah, no I apologise for my awful typing...my excuse is I posted in a rush.

 

should read "depends on how much you're willing to drop" - as in, they're pretty pricey

 

woohoo I'm not alone in the gash typing stakes!

[VeryPC_Ed]

Hey Alan,

 

If you're looking for another option to the traditional SAN providers, we can provide ISCSI SAN's based on Supermicro / Intel hardware with Microsoft Storage Server providing the storage management layer.

 

I'll pm my details if you want to have a chat and look at some options.

 

Thanks,

 

Ed

[glennda]

Nimble... we have just started supplying them and they are really good

[DSapseid]

i got my p4500 from @CPLTD in the summer.

[teejay]

We used to have Sun storage and was brilliant until Oracle bought them out.

 

We are now using Dell Equallogic kit, which is very good especially as our whole virtualised stack is Dell, so we only have one port of call in case of issues. Before our virtualisation stack was 3 different manufacturers and we did get in a nasty situation where each vendor was blaming each other for the failure.

 

EMC kit is very good, HP some people really like, NetApp some people love whereas others aren't too impressed by it.

 

All I would say is, do get pricing for more than one manufacturer and haggle hard, playing them off against each other as you'll be amazed how quickly certain manufacturers will suddenly come back with some very special bid pricing once they know other storage vendors are bidding.

[Modey]

I haven't used them personally, but Broadberry ( Custom Servers, Rack mount Servers, Storage Server Intel & AMD ) do some very cost effective SAN's and servers. They have a really good configurator on their site so you can play about with specs and price etc...

[Tall_Paul]

We've just been through a similar exercise.

 

Looked at HP, Dell, Overland, Nimble, EMC and NetApp.

 

I ended up going with HP as they gave us the most 'bang for our buck'.

 

Nimble was very interesting, and if I was buying a backup SAN or another SAN I would probably have taken a more extensive look but I decided to go for a more established vendor at this moment in time.

[Tallwood_6]

Dell Equallogic here and very happy, they are a little more pricey and prehaps not as scallable as the HP lefthand SAN's but i like the interface and the one time i have had to deal with support they where very helpful.

[pcstru]

We have just finished commissioning our Open-E SAN based around 2 Dell 720xd servers, each with 24 900GB 10K SAS drives. Each server is replicating the content of the other and should one fail, services will failover to the the other. The software is not quite as slick as our old DataCore SAN Melody, but the performance and functionality is what we need (and should be good for the next 3 years) at a fraction of the price of the other solutions we looked at.

[cpjitservices]

Netgear Readydata (http://www.netgear.co.uk/business/products/storage/ReadyDATA-family/) are quite good for SAN, or if you want flash storage try ... Nimbus Data: Leader in Sustainable Storage®

 

We use Nimbus.... It's fantastic!

Edited April 24, 2013 by cpjitservices

[psydii]

If you are putting it together yourself, then HP/Dell/EMC seem to be the market leading group.

 

We took the attitude that I never want to know about a problem and oursourced the building and maintenance of our VM/SAN infrastructure. We used VSG for this. Occasionally a man turns up to patch firmware, replace a faulty drive or update the remote monitoring software. We pay an additional fee for engineering time for VM changes simply because they are so infrequent we'd spend the best part of a month trying to remember how to do them.

[Haptic]

i got my p4500 from @CPLTD in the summer.

 

Great project, it's always nice when things go smoooooooothly!

 

Joe

[Marshall_IT]

Have you looked at qsan, I have a couple that have been performing well so far.

[apeman]

We run Dell Equallogics and EMC NS120, EMC VNX 5300

 

I would recommend EMC they have some great deals and there kit is fantastic and very very reliable, New interface on the VNX is very simple and easy to use. There is lots of very good documentation on EMC Powerlink.

Firmwares come out every quaterish but are well tested. Over 3 years of constant use with 75 drives we have only had 1 drive fail and nothings else. As EMC own VMWare they also have much better integration.

Try and find out who your EMC regional account manager is and go through them. Try and buy as much as you can up front or you will get stung for extras later but also be careful what they quote you for as they will add lots you will never need.

 

If you want to try the EMC VNX you can download a virtual machine called vmx simulator this is a fully functional vnx and can host up to 20GB (i think) great for testing.

 

Dell Equallogics is also good kit but the interface can be confusing and some bugs in the firmware, so wait at least 6months before you use any new features. Dell is only has only just got the same level of VMWare integration, so also could be buggy.

We have had a few drive fails and we have also had all our controllers swapped out because of a hardware bug.

Also make sure you buy a full Equallogic as you will pay more than the cost of a full populated san just to fill the empty bays.

[CyberNerd]

We run IBM DS3400 with a DS3000 expansion. It's due to be replaced this year and I'm looking at IBM DS3524 as a replacement along with other options.