SAN's & Virtualization

[Bezwick]

Hi everyone i could do with some advice on the possitives and negatives of the weath of options when selcting a new SAN and virtualization hypervisor.

 

Firstly we have a budget of around £25-30K, if we are given enough justification we could possibly get another £5K but i would like to avoid that as any extra we spend this year will be taken off us next year.

 

For that budget we would like a fast expendable SAN starting with at least 3TB of usuable storage space after being RAID'ed. We are looking for 15K SAS drives.

 

1 Management server, basically a big beast to use fo orginal setup, then we have two other servers that can be recycled.

1 Server to use for backups containing 10TB of SATA storage and we already have 2 LTO 4 tape drives.

 

Of the suppliers i have already asked every single one of them has come up with something completely different.

 

So far we have had Netapp, HP & Sun SANS, also VMware & Xen hypervisors (all but 1 have shy'd away from Hyper-V, now i dont know if thats because they cant make money on it or if it genuinely isnt up to the task).

 

Any advice on what to pick would be greatfully received.

 

Cheers

 

[alan-d]

Have a word with Stone Computers, for what you are after they will easily quote well within your budget, they are supplying and assisting our new setup in the summer and we have a larger setup than what you describe.

[pete]

Provide a bit of info on your intended usage / user numbers / size of network / server OS? All the things you've mentioned are viable, but you've not given us a lot to work with.

[Bezwick]

Intended usage will be all our files from the school so anything from word documents to video files.

We have around 1000 users, around 300 of which do Media/Photography and/or Music and generate rather large files.

Weh have around 200 desktop PC's, 60 Laptops and 70 Thin Clients.

Our servers currently are all Server 2003 R2, however we are planning on moving to 2008R2 sometime this year.

Hope that helps

[Tallwood_6]

HP LeftHand P4300 4.8TB SAS Starter SAN would possibly be work a look and is what we are currently looking at implementing, an Equalogic setup maybe within your budget as well as the much raved about SUN 7000 series unified storage solutions.

[teejay]

Personally, I'd look at unified storage and have the shares directly on the storage server rather than running through a virtualised server, then virtualise any app/infrstructure servers. That's what we have done, about a 50% bigger site than yours and its works a lot better than running the shares off a windows server.

For that size as well, you can use the free VMWare ESXi rather than buying the full version.

[bossman]

We have a Sun 7110 unified storage unit for our VMs 4Tb and a Hitachi SMS100 6.2Tb for all our users storage needs and this should see us over the next 10 years now so can work on updating our 1Gb fibre backbone to 10Gb with new cisco switches.

 

Cost for both units 13k and we are using Xen virtualisation solution which suits our needs as it is free and has more free features than VMware ESXi

Citrix Systems

[glennda]

We have a HP Msa 2000 fibre channel san with an hp 8/20q fibre switch currently connected to 3 x dl380 g5 the san currently has 5.4 tb of dual port 15k sas drives plus i also use an HP MSA 20 and MSA 60 in my backup room for storing backups - these use 7.2k sata hard disks (one uses 1tb hard disks the other uses 250gb disks)

 

Toby