FN-GM Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 I've been using Dell SANs of one description (Equallogic in the past, Compellent now) or another for upwards of ten years. I won't say that I've never had issues with them but they've been reliable and always performed well. I have trust in those as well. We have 4 Dell SANs in service between all our schools. They are all nearly 5 and haven't been any trouble apart from a drive failure in one of them.
matte53 Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 I have. I will be ordering this week. It will be a storage spaces direct setup. It is worth noting that Dell include setup in the cost when you buy S2D certified hardware. Out of interest what models/specs/numbers did you go for?
mavhc Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 SANs seemed ok, but kind of an overkill unless you're a massive school with 100 VMs and 20 servers. That was until people told me about you only being able to buy drives from the people who made the SAN, that's just lame.
Norphy Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 That was until people told me about you only being able to buy drives from the people who made the SAN, that's just lame. That's not unusual for enterprise level kit
SHimmer45 Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 approved firmware and drives which they have tested and tested to make sure they work properly and make it onto the qualified vendor lists that they can then slap a premium on
nicholab Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 Would you be able to post some pricing and spec for your setup as it would be a usefull yard stick for others.
TIOAOA Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 Would you be able to post some pricing and spec for your setup as it would be a usefull yard stick for others. I agree a yard stick would be very helpful in these situations, even just basic specs and cost would help rather than having to register an interest in something you ultimately cannot afford but still have to dodge months worth of sales calls
Katy Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 SANs seemed ok, but kind of an overkill unless you're a massive school with 100 VMs and 20 servers. That was until people told me about you only being able to buy drives from the people who made the SAN, that's just lame. Depends. On our HP SAN (Which just holds a replica of the veeam backups) I just buy WD Red drives and swap them myself, just use the drive carriers from the expensive drives that I got with the thing in the first place. The WD drives seem to fail less than the HP ones too. Hitachi one is under maintenance which means they come and do the firmware updates and they also come and do drive swaps (and we don't pay for the drives). Now we're into year 6 with multiple drive failures a year it works out cheaper for the maintenance than if we were just buying the drives ourselves.
PotNoodleTech Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 Depends. On our HP SAN (Which just holds a replica of the veeam backups) I just buy WD Red drives and swap them myself, just use the drive carriers from the expensive drives that I got with the thing in the first place. The WD drives seem to fail less than the HP ones too. Hitachi one is under maintenance which means they come and do the firmware updates and they also come and do drive swaps (and we don't pay for the drives). Now we're into year 6 with multiple drive failures a year it works out cheaper for the maintenance than if we were just buying the drives ourselves. Multiple drive faliures a year? How many drives do you have in there?
Norphy Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 I've not seen many SANs with less than 20 drives in them. If the thing is six years old, it's not surprising to see that many drive failures.
Katy Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 Multiple drive faliures a year? How many drives do you have in there? 24 but the majority of the drives are 5 years old. First 5 years we had one drive fail (in year 3). Never had multiple failures occur together so never had any data loss or service interruption. Edit: The HP one has 12 drives (as they're 3.5s) but that's also been reliable enough (it's now 9 years old)
Primus Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 I'm jinxing things massively but our SAN is 5 and we've not had a single drive fail. 24 drives in total. Just extended the warranty for another 2 years!
bossman Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 (edited) Moved away from SANs years ago when I found Synology giving me the same IOPs and connectivity with their NAS top end units at a fraction of the cost.... Total failover with 3 Dell R710 hosts and 2 synced Synology units with 2 current GIG switches and all having redundant power units... a third Synology unit for Veeam VM backup and then up to the cloud from that Synology unit with their own app inbuilt on the unit... My first SAN cost £30k then had to purchase the servers and the switches.... No failover as such except for RAID5 total cost approx £50k at that time... Latest setup with Synology using SSDs as the caching end and WD Reds 8TB drives for storage total cost.....£18k .......3 years ago this was...probably even cheaper now and they all have multiple 10GB nics as standard and all come with 5 years warrant and support..... No Brainer really.....well it was for me....been so good for the past 3 years as was the one before that for 5 years.....not a bad return for your money... Edited June 20, 2018 by bossman
PotNoodleTech Posted June 20, 2018 Posted June 20, 2018 24 but the majority of the drives are 5 years old. First 5 years we had one drive fail (in year 3). Never had multiple failures occur together so never had any data loss or service interruption. Edit: The HP one has 12 drives (as they're 3.5s) but that's also been reliable enough (it's now 9 years old) I understand. I try and change my drives out every 5 years max. The drives are the least reliable thing in a server in my experience.
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