Choosing SAN questions

[Butuz]

Hitatchi (used to be IBM) deskstar PATA/SATA drives earned the name "deathstar" over a 10 year period of constant faliures.

 

Buy a hitatchi san at your peril IMHO.

 

Butuz

[gshaw]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

[Duke]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

 

Heard of them but never had any experience with them personally. They're not a name that usually comes up at a school-level of doing things, but that doesn't automatically mean anything. A quick glance of their site suggests they're very much SAN-only as opposed to the unified storage Sun/Oracle do and the multi-protocol offerings of NetApp and EMC. If you just want VMware support then there's nothing wrong with iSCSI, but personally I prefer NFS and having full NAS (CIFS) support means I can point Windows users directly to my storage. Why have a virtual machine running Windows to present shares as a storage server whose back-end is the SAN, when you can just let them connect directly to the SAN/NAS and bypass the VMware + Windows overhead?

[gshaw]

Ye true, was thinking the same as our Windows Storage server has been a right pain at times with AV, Windows Updates etc. Do you use NFS for your VMs at all? It's something I've seen a few people doing these days, just wondering how widespread it is amongst people's installs here...

[torledo]

Another one into the mix from a meeting today... DotHill was suggested as something pretty solid to base the VM environment on. Any thoughts?

 

from what i remember Sun used to [may still do, haven't checked] sell a range of DAS/SAN storage which were OEM'ed from Dothill.

 

Like a lot of SAN vendors, Sun also sell storage based on the popular LSI logic midrange products [although it wasn't merely a case of sticking a Sun label on, there would have been i imagine a fair amount of Sun value added]. IBM and others do likewise with the LSI stuff. And IBM have some of their own interesting products higher up the midrange you go.

 

As always it boils down to how much you have to spend. The S7000 certainly seems to have shifted the goalposts as far as bang per buck with multiprotocol storage, but i think it'll always be the case that you have those who like to stick to certain brands.

[Duke]

[...] Do you use NFS for your VMs at all? It's something I've seen a few people doing these days, just wondering how widespread it is amongst people's installs here...

 

Yep, it's definitely my preferred connectivity for VMware. iSCSI works fine (and I use it on my NetApp box as I don't have an NFS licence) but I find NFS is more flexible - on the S7000 you get much better analytics because it's as the file-level rather than the block-level. Nothing wrong with either approach, but NFS definitely works well.