Wahey - A SAN!!

[garethEds]

Wahey - school finally okayed our new SAN.

 

Thank you.

 

Goodnight

 

Gareth

[plexer]

It'll be cancelled tomorrow, lol

 

Ben

[ConradJones]

not if hes ordered it already,

[glennda]

Which one??

[featured_spectre]

Pics or it didn't happen

[garethEds]

Pics when it arrives. Purchasing on lease :-) 3 years through the LEA. Lease has been setup - just got to order tomorrow.

 

It's to go with our two new servers which were ordered in March and have been sat there waiting for the SAN for our new HyperV setup.

 

Gareth

[glennda]

Pics when it arrives. Purchasing on lease :-) 3 years through the LEA. Lease has been setup - just got to order tomorrow.

 

It's to go with our two new servers which were ordered in March and have been sat there waiting for the SAN for our new HyperV setup.

 

Gareth

 

But which one?

[Tall_Paul]

Congrats! Am currently transferring all my real estate from my old HP SAN to my new HP SAN.

[garethEds]

We've bought an HP2000 to go with the new HP servers we bought two months ago. Should be arriving a week Monday as there is nobody here over half term. Not a massive amount of space to start with 7.2Tb but plenty of room to grow.

 

We've virtualised the majority of stuff but they are stored locally. Just need to move them over to the SAN.

 

Excited mind.

 

Gareth

[glennda]

Not too shabby you'll get about 6TB usable, ISCSI/FC/DAS?

 

I have had mixed results with those SANs but they do work well. How many servers are you going to run from it?

 

You will find those SANs are actually rebadged from the DotHill 2000 range.

[garethEds]

Hiya @glennda

 

It's a start. We will get it all in place and then when more funding comes through will get some extra hard drives for it.

 

Gareth

[glennda]

Hiya @glennda

 

It's a start. We will get it all in place and then when more funding comes through will get some extra hard drives for it.

 

Gareth

 

Its not a shabby san as i say, at the introductory level, but if you struggle for performance it is a controller upgrade to go for, the main problem i have seen from the p2000 range is expansion in size but not controller. So people expect to be able to add 3 x storage arrays and expect better performance because they have more arrays running off the same controllers. With expansion downwards you also need to upgrade the controllers in these sans. Expansion in arrays doesn't mean better performance,.

[Roberto]

But which one?

 

We've just placed an order for a Dell Equallogic PS-M4110E & a PS-M4110X with a new blade chassis to put them in alongside 4 fully loaded M910 blade servers. Time to update one of the virtual farms...

[KevinB]

We've just placed an order for a Dell Equallogic PS-M4110E & a PS-M4110X with a new blade chassis to put them in alongside 4 fully loaded M910 blade servers. Time to update one of the virtual farms...

 

Sorry to bump a 2-month old thread, but have you got the PS series SANs up and running yet? What was the experience like?

 

We're looking to virtualise this year and the PS4110E is a model that I have my eye on.

[Roberto]

We've been delighted with them @KevinB. Piece of cake to set up though keep in mind I'm saying that as someone who's already used to Dell blades & Equallogic SANs (though I never thought they were difficult to set up back when we encountered our first one).

 

The integration into the blade chassis is working well for us and makes a lot of sense if you also pick the option to integrate switch fabric, rather than simple pass-thru connections, into the blade chassis too as it makes the wiring a lot more sensible than on our other virtualisation farm where we used the same blade chassis with external equallogic SANs.

 

I'm happy with the SAN HQ software, etc. too. All in all it's been a pleasent experience so far.

Edited July 17, 2013 by Roberto

[KevinB]

Thanks, that's good to know

[twin--turbo]

I am pressing our old Dell ( EMC Clarrion) AX4-5i back into frontline service as our P4500 HP is out of space.

 

Rob

[glennda]

Take a look at the Nimble CS210/CS220 if you are looking at the PS41* series. If anything apart from the fact they are more up to date technology it will make Dell drop there pants to convince you to buy a Equalogic. I have installed 2 nimbles in the last week and to say the performance is Amazing is an understatement, plus the built in compression (both are running at 35% compression) its quality kit.

 

If you have any questions of the Nimbles give me a shout they are one of the best bits of kit out in the San world at the moment and would put an Equalogic to shame.

[KevinB]

Thanks @glennda , I've seen quite a few recommendations for Nimble as I've been scouring the forums today and will be adding them to the list of possible solutions. Do you know offhand of any educationally biased resellers that sell Nimble or are they more of a direct to vendor solution?

[glennda]

Thanks @glennda , I've seen quite a few recommendations for Nimble as I've been scouring the forums today and will be adding them to the list of possible solutions. Do you know offhand of any educationally biased resellers that sell Nimble or are they more of a direct to vendor solution?

 

Not that are just educationally focused, my company does which is why I rave, are you on Twitter? best thing to do is find @Nick_Dyer_ and find out from him. He is the Senior Engineer for Nimble in the UK both pre and post sales.

[Norphy]

Take a look at the Nimble CS210/CS220 if you are looking at the PS41* series. If anything apart from the fact they are more up to date technology it will make Dell drop there pants to convince you to buy a Equalogic. I have installed 2 nimbles in the last week and to say the performance is Amazing is an understatement, plus the built in compression (both are running at 35% compression) its quality kit.

 

If you have any questions of the Nimbles give me a shout they are one of the best bits of kit out in the San world at the moment and would put an Equalogic to shame.

 

Can I get one of those into my blade centre?

[glennda]

Can I get one of those into my blade centre?

 

What bladecenter is it?

 

They are one of the only devices certified to go into a Cisco UCS I know that, but i can find out.

[Norphy]

It's a Dell M1000E. That's why we went with the PS-M4110 series in the first place. If, however, third parties are doing blades for them it would be interesting for future reference!

[glennda]

It's a Dell M1000E. That's why we went with the PS-M4110 series in the first place. If, however, third parties are doing blades for them it would be interesting for future reference!

 

Sorry it won't sit within the blade itself my bad, but it is most likely compatible to connect into it but will need to check with Nimble.

[jamesrhart]

Hi,

 

Just to put my two pence in, we have just been through a similar process of evaluating which SAN to purchase, we have around 8 Hyper V hosts all with local storage and really wanted a large amount of storage (when does it stop growing!) and some redundancy in terms of Hyper V hosts - we looked at Dell, HP and then came across (through edugeek of course!) Nimble.

 

HP fell through pretty quickly based on the timeframe to just get a quote from them. Dell was a very close second and we liked the idea of single vendor but didn't want to be held back by that idea (we also purchased 2 x R620's with 256GB RAM in each for a new Hyper V cluster, along with 2 x Dell 6248 switches to be dedicated to the SAN switching - the R620s are extremely power efficient compared to our old PE2900's and even the R710's - not to mention going from 5U to 1U!), I had some very good conversations with Matt from Nimble (with plenty of questions from me) and ultimately we chose them, I think the key for us was to look very closely at what was actually being offered by each vendor in terms of performance in real terms as well as accessing future growth and needs (possible VDI etc.), for us there was a clear winner!

 

We went with a single CS240 (unfortunately our budget wouldn't allow for 2!), which means that we will leverage snapshots for short term backups but will keep DPM and some very large NAS boxes and tape library going for long term/disaster recovery). We haven't received it yet, so will try to update how we get on when it arrives, but really looking forward to putting it through it paces and checking out infosight.

 

I'm in Devon, but if anyone wants to see it in action (when we've got it in and running of course) or have a chat feel free to PM me.