I Want a SAN. Please.

[westleya]

OK, I'm running out of storge, I don't want to buy any more DC's, I'm on CC3 so upgrading my current servers is going to cost me most of my appendages.

 

So I want a SAN. I hear that Sun do a good one, but I'm open to offers. Would require 2 new DC's to go with it and 5TB storage to start off with. MUST have plenty of upgradability.

 

The idea is to create a new domain with this kit, and for us to do the data migration once all is set up and working.

 

Quote me happy

[Guest Guest]

OK, I'm running out of storge, I don't want to buy any more DC's, I'm on CC3 so upgrading my current servers is going to cost me most of my appendages.

 

So I want a SAN. I hear that Sun do a good one, but I'm open to offers. Would require 2 new DC's to go with it and 5TB storage to start off with. MUST have plenty of upgradability.

 

The idea is to create a new domain with this kit, and for us to do the data migration once all is set up and working.

 

Quote me happy

 

5tb!!! Are you sure? Thats a hell of alot. Do you have alot of duplicate files? Suns stuff runs on ZFS... (work it out)

 

If you do need 5tb+ you'll be looking at the S7210 with the rack of disks. £15-20k with discount maybe?

[westleya]

Yep. We do iMedia here and some kids have over a GB of movies, audio and pics already and they're only in year 9...

 

No duplicates - I'm spending a lot of time clearing stuff off the network just to keep running, though.

 

I'm expecting to pay anything up to around 30k for this.

[teejay]

The Sun stuff is excellent and has the benefit of being unified storage rather than just SAN, so will operate as a NAS as well.

With this type of stuff though, you really do need to do some research into what you want to do. Some solutions suit certain requirements better than others at this sort of thing and there are quite a few implementation gotchas along the way.

[Guest Guest]

Your gunna have to look at SANs which have "controllers" (CPU, ram, cards etc) with seperate HD caddy rack thingymajigs. (Sorry, cant for the life of me remember what they are called).

 

With that amount of data flying around id certainly be looking at using the SAN as the file server directly, rather than having virtual disks or iSCSI targets containing the data. ZFS can compress the data and increase IO due to todays fast CPUs. Have a look at ZFS, it really is amazing! Oh and also the SUN stuff can have a flash HD to do caching to boost performance.

[DrummerBoy]

Having just upgraded our old AN (or bought a new one as it's also known!!), I can tell you that the SUN SANs are actually Hitachi.

 

We trialled a Hitachi SAN, and it's an excellent piece of kit, but it's the Rolls Royce end of things.

 

We have 13TB and went with a Fibre Channel EMC in the end (we already had EMC so training was a lower overhead).

 

PM me if you want further details as to why we didn't choose the HDS beast (nothing wrong with it BTW!).

[Butuz]

I have nothing but praise for Sun 7110s. Unfortunatly when I was shopping they only did 2tb ones, so I had to buy 2 of em! But now they do a 4.2tb version which should suit your needs to a tee (so long as you can skimp on that 0.8gb).

 

They're ultra fast, ultra reliable (so far!) and ultra managable! VMWare ESX over NFS works a treat!

 

Butuz

[teejay]

Having just upgraded our old AN (or bought a new one as it's also known!!), I can tell you that the SUN SANs are actually Hitachi.

 

We trialled a Hitachi SAN, and it's an excellent piece of kit, but it's the Rolls Royce end of things.

 

We have 13TB and went with a Fibre Channel EMC in the end (we already had EMC so training was a lower overhead).

 

PM me if you want further details as to why we didn't choose the HDS beast (nothing wrong with it BTW!).

 

The Sun S7000 unified storgae devices are not Hitachi, they are a fully in house Sun development based on Solaris. Some of the Sun SAN only products are rebadged Hitahci, but these I believe are being dropped in the Sun/Oracle merger.

[Soulfish]

The Sun 9000 series of SANs are re-badged Hitachi kit, and as has been mentioned is being dropped by Oracle pretty soon.

 

The S7000 range that we all rant and rave about is fully developed by Sun . For 5tb you'd be looking a the 7210 or 7310. I'd suggest giving Andy at the Cutter project a ring to see what he can do for you

[glennda]

I have a HP MSA2000 here but i am not sure it will be big enough for you. I have seen a Dell Equalogic in use at a few demos and from what i saw it was pretty good -

 

Toby

[Avalon]

i am looking into to doing a similar thing. we currently have three reasonable spec terminal servers (dual quad-core xeons) which i intend to use as the virtual hosts for our new infrastructure increasing the ram in each from 4Gb to 32Gb.

 

The SAN i was looking at was a HP MSA2312i with an initial capacity of around 6Tb and a tape autoloader to take a snapshot of the data once a day.

 

i intend to run vmware vsphere advanced

 

total cost including training about £35k

[soapyfish]

I was in very similar situation to you last year again running CC3 not wanting anymore physical servers.

 

RM suggested two options that they would be prepared to support one being an EMC carilon which was awesome (I saw one at BETT2009) it was loud and very expensive. The other option that RM suggested the Hitachi SMS 100 mini SAN that I eventually purchased its not upgradable but the support package was good and 6.4TB it is going to be enough for me for some time to come.

 

So guess in short have you looked at the Hitachi SMS 100 ?

[john]

Another happy Sun S7000 user, I have the 4TB 7110 and its excellent Cannot reccomend them enough. As has been said get in touch with Andy @ The Cutter Project he is worth his weight in gold.