Storage options

[mrbios]

This year I'm looking to improve our storage performance, I'm looking for some ideas on how to do that, this is our current setup:

4 x VM host servers - Running VMware ESXi 5.5 which I'm looking to replace with Hyper-V this summer

2 x Eonstor DS 12 bay iSCSI SANs with mostly consumer grade SSDs used for VM storage (will be 4 years old this summer)

1 x Eonstor 16 bay iSCSI SAN (very old, looking at 6-7 years) full of 2TB WD black SATA disks and used as file storage

 

We've been to look at a Nimble storage box, this is quite an expensive solution but the presentation of it blew us away, especially the support side of things. We'd be looking at probably removing the 16 bay eonstor entirely and using one of the 12 bay ones for file storage and using the nimble box as VM storage.

 

While i love the nimble product from what I've seen of it, i really need to cover all other potential ground in order to be sure that what we'd be spending on that is the best choice financially.

 

So Edugeek throw at me your alternative storage options! I need options

 

EDIT: I'm also thinking about my options in terms of using storage replica in server 10 on the two Eonstor DS boxes for storage replication and failover for file based storage.

Edited January 26, 2015 by mrbios

[Asad_Symitry]

Did you put together a solution to replace this at all?

[themightymrp]

I just look at that spec at the top and think "I wish we could afford just the OLD iSCSI SAN!!"

[mrbios]

Did you put together a solution to replace this at all?

 

We ended up getting a Nimble CS215. I can happily say it was a fantastic decision

 

In terms of real world performance example.... sims reports are tons quicker. Our sims admin runs some of the larger reports that on our old storage could cause the rest of the staff around school to phone and ask if there was something wrong with sims, but since moving to the nimble reports that could have taken literally minutes before now take no more than 10 seconds.

 

We ended up moving all our VMs and file data on to it as we had the space available, and now using one of the old eonstor DS boxes as D2D backup storage, and the other one as a storage unit for our lab network which i've just started building. At the same time as putting in the nimble i moved our file server on to 2012R2 and enabled deduplication....still having a problem with it seeing the same amount of space savings as windows sees though.