Rate your SAN

[gshaw]

Just looking for opinions on the hardware you're using at the moment in terms of features, reliability and speed. Also interested to hear your experiences if you've expanded your SAN to add more disks in terms of cost and ease of upgrade.

 

Basically it comes down to...

 

- has it been reliable

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage

- was it good value on initial purchase

- has support been good if \ when required

- would you buy a similar model again?

 

Especially interested if you have any of the following...

 

HP P4000 series (Lefthand)

Dell EqualLogic

Netapp FAS2020

 

I know loads of people will recommend their Sun S7000 boxes as they seem to have really high satisfaction rates but the only problem I see there is that the smallest one seems to be 14TB now, which is way more than we need and as such probably too expensive as things stand...

[DanWebb]

I would also be interested in hearing from anyone using any of the EcoVault 200 series SANs.

 

Thanks in advance

[Soulfish]

Currently have two SANs. A Sun/Oracle 7110 and an EMC Celerra NS-480. Both are good units and both have (touch wood) been reliable.

 

The EMC is a new purchase after a tender was put out for a new SAN. EMC offered a much larger system for a lower cost than everyone else, so in that respect it's been good value. The 7110 was great value since it was half price . The support on both has been good, although its definitely needed on the EMC unit. It's so complex that I'm very glad it was installed and setup by EMC. Didn't help that we had one of the first live installs of their new FastCache technology in the world and it'd been specced up wrong by them!

 

I'd probably buy a Sun/Oracle unit again once it was very clear what was going on and after they've ironed out the issues with Sun/oracle integration. EMC would depending on price, and what they were giving compared to everyone else .

 

From the three that you've listed I'd be careful with the FAS2020. It's a very poor performing product (just ask Duke on here about his ) as it's a cut down box without the horsepower to really make use of alot of Netapps nice features. You really need a FAS2040 (which is actually newer and faster than a FAS2050) to start to get anywhere. The HP P4000's and Equallogic units are both nice, and I know if we had our stuff replaced with them here I'd still be pretty happy using them .

[pantscat]

I've got a Netapp FAS2020 - have only had it since I went virtual in July though!

 

I use it as a NFS target for VMware and a CIFS area for file storage.

 

- has it been reliable - Yes, absolutely.

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage - Yes, more than happy - 13TB raw storage and performance is absolutely fine

- was it good value on initial purchase Certainly seemed to be - I looked at Sun, HP, Dell and LeftHand alternatives and the Netapp seemed to offer better vfm

- has support been good if \ when required - Yes - only had one minor query, but was resolved within a couple of hours

- would you buy a similar model again? Yep - definitely.

[synaesthesia]

Also very interested in this at the moment, looking for one for the near future. If anyone could give an idea of price also that would be HUGELY appreciated - would rather not have to sit through supplier's waffle whilst they suck in air over their teeth!

[robknowles]

Hello,

 

We have a Dell EqualLogic PS4000XV (16 x 450GB Disks, Redundant Modules)

 

- has it been reliable Yes, no problems - had it two years now!

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage Yes

- was it good value on initial purchase Yes

- has support been good if \ when required Never needed technical support on it, but their support site is excellent.

- would you buy a similar model again? Yes, if using for Virtualised Environments/VDI, for My Documents/File Shares storage I brought a Dell MD3220i last year.

 

Thanks,

 

Rob

[CyberNerd]

IBM DS3400 (SAS) with DS3000 (SATA) expansion

2x 4GB FC switch

 

 

- has it been reliable yes, notwithstanding the schools dodgy power supply without UPS

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage yes

- was it good value on initial purchase yes

- has support been good if \ when required very, some power supply issues caused some problems (before we spent another £3k on UPS) IBM provided recovery scripts based on our specific setup

- would you buy a similar model again?yes

 

If it is available/affordable I would seriously consider getting intels FCoE instead of regular fibre channel - it would allow FC to run over a 10GB/s ethernet backbone, thus negating the need to spend on ethernet switches and FC switches.

[Duke]

NetApp FAS2020

 

- has it been reliable: Yes and no. Generally runs fine, about two kernel crashes a year on average. An ONTAP upgrade would probably fix this, but the current upgrade path is so convoluted and I don't think my FAS2020 will run the latest version so it doesn't seem worth it.

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage: It did initially, but I've found moving to CIFS from iSCSI has meant a drop in performance and we're now short on space. Buying another disk tray for it will cost me the same as a new Sun S7120 so we're looking at building a Backblaze-style box instead. Performance from the FAS2020's processor is renowned for being poor under heavy load.

- was it good value on initial purchase: Yes, at the time the S7000 wasn't around and the FAS2020 was one of the few enterprise-level, upgradable, expandable solutions and we got a very good end-of-year price on it.

- has support been good if \ when required: Not especially but I can't completely answer this - I once phoned up NetApp and asked for support and got through to their internal IT support department - HOWEVER, we couldn't afford a full support contract so this to be expected.

- would you buy a similar model again? No, we looked at going the NetApp route to meet our growing storage and VM requirements and the best solution they could offer us came in at £120k. The S7410 came in at £37.5k for a bigger, faster box.

 

Oracle Sun S7410 - I know you said you weren't bothered about this but it is our primary SAN and based on my experience a cheap S7000 should be in line with a FAS2020, are you 100% sure it's out of your price range?

 

- has it been reliable: Again, yes and no, we've had more 'issues' with it than the FAS2020 but they've all been easier to troubleshoot and in almost all cases the box has stayed up even when it's having problems, whereas a crash on the FAS2020 completely kills it.

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage: Yep.

- was it good value on initial purchase: Definitely, compared to everything else we looked it.

- has support been good if \ when required: Yeah, the complete fallout of the Oracle transition remains to be seen, but so far everything has been fine.

- would you buy a similar model again? Looking at getting a S7120 when I can afford it.

 

Chris

[gshaw]

Thanks for the replies so far

 

NetApp is a very interesting one, the feature that really sells them is the dedupe but whether that in itself is worth the price premium I'm not yet sure. We've been stung by their support with the StoreVault (granted a different market sector but I didn't like NetApp hiding product manuals behind a support contract). The lack of CPU power does seem to keep popping up, again for the price I'm not 100% convinced.

 

The main issue with the Oracle kit is that the smallest model is 14TB now, it's a good price for that no doubt but it's paying for storage we're not using and so pushes the price up.

 

The main SAN that's been popping up in a lot of our quotes so far is the HP P2000 (aka MSA). On one hand it'll probably do the trick and looks easier to expand than the P4000 (Lefthand) range but there's one or two issues that seem to crop up on forums performance-wise, mainly RAID6 volumes very slow. That concerns me a bit as I'd want the RAID6 resiliency for user data.

 

EqualLogic seems to be slightly better than the LeftHand on a technical level, again it's loved or loathed in equal measure depending on who you speak to...

 

Apparently snapshots are pretty slow on HP boxes as well but that said with DPM and \ or Veeam are snapshots such a big issue now? I know NetApp uses SnapManager as a backup solution but again with the price you pay for it DPM might be a better fit for us?

[Duke]

NetApp is a very interesting one, the feature that really sells them is the dedupe but whether that in itself is worth the price premium I'm not yet sure. We've been stung by their support with the StoreVault (granted a different market sector but I didn't like NetApp hiding product manuals behind a support contract). The lack of CPU power does seem to keep popping up, again for the price I'm not 100% convinced.

 

Be VERY careful with this. De-dupe looked really good to us too until we bought the box and deployed it. I had planned to have a 2TB volume for backups, but for testing we just had a 200GB LUN set up. We enabled de-dupe on it and ran some backups to it and were seeing very good de-duplication figures. We then went to put the 2TB volume into production and were told the de-dupe limit is 500GB volumes. I said "Okay, I'll upgrade the licence on de-dupe as being able to de-dupe all 4TB of our data on this SAN was one of the key selling points, how much will that cost?" and was told that we can't. De-duping 500GB volumes is a hard, artificial cap that NetApp have set on the FAS2020 and if you want more you need to upgrade the whole box to a FAS2040. This was definitely the case a couple of years back and I don't think it's changed, I believe it was in part due to the processor in the FAS2020.

 

Also calculate your long-term support costs with NetApp. They rarely do discount on support and we recently had a ONE year renewal for the FAS2020 that cost over DOUBLE our quote for putting a THREE year warranty extension on SEVEN Dell servers.

 

This is just FYI - NetApp are in principal still a tier-one storage provider.

 

Chris

[gshaw]

Had a feeling that might be the case with NetApp, they do seem to have some sneaky licensing \ support hidden costs which I'm not keen on.

 

One other one to throw in if anyone has it... Hitachi AMS series... apparently pretty good but there's not as many reviews \ info out there as there is for the usual suspects...

[azc]

We have an Axstor Ai-4000 iSCSI SAN which has 8 SATA disks.

 

- has it been reliable?

Yes. We've had it running since 2008, and in that time we've only had one occasion where it locked up solid and required a reset. It's since had newer firmware installed and has been problem-free for at least 2 years now.

 

- has it met your requirements for performance and storage

Absolutely. We run all of our VMWare ESX servers from it and it also holds all the network data for both staff and students. We bought it filled with 500GB disks but have since swapped them out for 1TB disks, which was simply a case of replacing them one at a time and waiting for the array to rebuild before repeating the process with the next disk. Each LUN can have its own RAID level, so more important LUNs can be configured for greater redundancy.

 

- was it good value on initial purchase

We paid £6,357.00 (ex VAT) for it back in 2008. I feel that's pretty good value.

 

- has support been good if \ when required

The unit was supplied by our general IT support company and they have supported it since.

 

- would you buy a similar model again?

No qualms about that whatsoever. I've been very impressed with it.

Edited February 15, 2011 by azc

[zag]

Can anyone explain what advantages a SAN would have over my current setup which is 2 x RAID 5 file servers that mirror each other.

 

I really don't get it, but I must be missing something

[Duke]

Can anyone explain what advantages a SAN would have over my current setup which is 2 x RAID 5 file servers that mirror each other.

 

I really don't get it, but I must be missing something

 

It all depends on what you want to do, how you want to access the storage, what your performance and uptime requirements are, etc. If you run out of space on one/both of your servers, how will you deal with it? Presumably you don't have an easy, smooth storage upgrade option and if you're running Windows then you'd need to maybe add more disks, expand the RAID array (if the card supported it), then grow the Windows partitions, etc. Not a 'advised' procedure, and you might want to actually backup your data, build a new, bigger array and restore the data to it - not much fun either. In both cases you're limited to how much physical storage you can fit in the server.

 

If my S7000 runs out of space, I buy another 24-disk tray, plug it in the back, add it to the pool and just start using the extra space, no rebuilding or major reconfigurion or growing of partitions needed. I can do this up to about 0.5PB if I want to, which is likely more than you'll manage with a Windows server.

 

Although we're all saying SAN, most of us will also have NAS functionality and some may have unified storage - that means CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, NFS, HTTP, FTP, etc. all from one box and managed from the same point. Windows can do most of those protocols, but it'll be through different bits of software, managed from different places, all running through the overhead of Windows, etc.

 

A SAN is just a dedicated, performance-oriented (it may not be high performance, but the disk type will be dictated but your requirements, e.g. tiered storage) storage device.

 

Chris

[CyberNerd]

Can anyone explain what advantages a SAN would have over my current setup which is 2 x RAID 5 file servers that mirror each other.

 

I really don't get it, but I must be missing something

 

With SAN you can have multiple servers accessing the same filesystem, simultaneously over fibre Chanel. This is really useful for scalability because you can dynamically add servers. With NAS (file servers) you only have one server sharing the data.

[Duke]

Also very interested in this at the moment, looking for one for the near future. If anyone could give an idea of price also that would be HUGELY appreciated - would rather not have to sit through supplier's waffle whilst they suck in air over their teeth!

 

I must has skipped over this post, sorry! Costs will vary anywhere from <£10k to >£100k for the type of system you might see in a school. It all depends on what functionality you want and what level of 'enterprise features' you expect. Best bet would be to start a new thread with your requirements and I'm sure plenty of people will come in with ideas and ballpark figures. I swear, I've spent far too long watching your avatar while I sit here going -_- ^_^ -_- ^_^

[Hebdenlad]

So, the entry level S7120 is 12TB (12x 1TB drives) but as with all other vendors who recommend a RAID (not stripe) you will never get the full RAW capacity as usable. What RAID level you want / need depends on the business and application need. The good thing with the S7x20 range is that once you buy your chosen box there re no, I repeat, no licences to buy for whatever protocol you intend to use. The box supports compression, think provisioning, de-duplication (at a block level and in-line, not post process like NetApp), NFS, iSCSI, SMB< FC, IB and so on and on and on. It also has analytics - ask on here about how damn good that is - and again included in the cost of the box.

 

Chat to some of the guys on here who have used them for feedback - mine tends to be slightly biased as you can appreciate.

 

We have some really good Oracle partners who are on here too and they can help you out in terms of configurations and all that stuff. If you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Cheers,

 

Phil

[mrbios]

Eonstor ES S16E-G1240

 

Reliability - Very good, not had a single problem due to the device itself.

Performance - Very good, over 1200 people hammer it daily and file access speeds are pretty good, we were also hosting a load of VMs on it for a while and that worked well, performance was good but for the sake of increasing performance i moved the VMs off it recently.

Cost - compared to alot of the competition eonstors are pretty cheap, a perfectly good solution for schools as we don't need anything bigger unless we were in a much much bigger school.

Support - Infortrend have a good support portal and support has been pretty good in the past, not that i've ever needed to use it for anything more than checking on what memory to use for an upgrade to it.

 

All in all pretty pleased with it

[nicholab]

It is a good point that a SAN supplier may give you a good price on the initial purchase but subsequent update can be expensive.

[Duke]

It also has analytics - ask on here about how damn good that is - and again included in the cost of the box.

 

Very damn good!

 

It is a good point that a SAN supplier may give you a good price on the initial purchase but subsequent update can be expensive.

 

*cough*NetApp-warranty-and-licensing-grr-trying-to-build-a-BackBlaze-instead-now*cough*

[Norphy]

We have a pair of Equallogic SANs, one PS5000 and one PS6000. They're being used for VMware storage and for file server storage.

 

has it been reliable

For the most part, yes. We had an issue with one of them where we had two disk failures more or less at once and we couldn't persuade the array to rebuild (Thank god for RAID 6 + hotspares!). Got around it eventually with the help of Dell tech support.

 

We also had difficulty doing a firmware upgrade on one of them, again Dell tech support helped us to resolve the problem

 

has it met your requirements for performance and storage

Yes. They handle the workload put on them with ease.

 

was it good value on initial purchase

Compared with similarly specced EMCs, yes. Still £35k a piece though!

 

has support been good if \ when required

Yes

 

would you buy a similar model again?

Would and in fact are. We have a PS6500 due to us at the end of the week for a new vSphere farm.

[mister_z]

Using Clariion from old CX500s thru CX4s, and Celerra/NS NAS. If you demand performance and reliability, I consider them the ones to beat.

 

Disclaimer: I moonlight pro bono for education, my day job is in a specialized offshoot of a large financial instution, so I have deep pockets.

 

I have mutiple SAN farms in a number of states in the US. Never lost data due to equipment failure. My counterparts in the Windows world just lost (temporarily) 11 TB of data due to Dell MD1000 DAS array failures a month ago. Yes, they had backups, but data were inaccessible until the restores (11 TB worth in small files!) were complete. Very painful and embarassing -- and now that the horse is gone, my boss told me to move their stuff to the SAN and get them out of the storage business

 

So reason #1 for a SAN ? Reliability. What you get for the price is redundancy, engineering, and features like scrubbing and performance analysis and improvements.

 

2. You get better manageability. I have over 100 servers in a typical site. The question "What's the approximate total storage in site X ?" is answered in minutes or less. That may sound trivial until you need to generate budget numbers quickly because the financial picture just changed. And maintaining 15% headroom means when my boss says "How quickly can we . . . ?" the answer is "Right away." This is also an advantage of NAS appliances.

 

3. You get re-use. When a need disappears, circumstances change, or I just plain goofed on the estimate, I can move storage logically thru re-zoning to meet changing conditions. This is also an advantage of NAS appliances, thru different means.

 

4. You get portability. If I need to upgrade a Linux server, I provision a new one, and on the appointed day I export the LUNs from one server, import them on the other, and I'm back in business quickly. I could rsync them, to be sure, but that means time spent to do it, sometimes a long time, and also the duplicate disks since the target and destination must be separate. This is also an advantage of NAS appliances.

 

5. Fiber channel - you get security. The FC imposes an additional security layer. Our Clariions are only accessible thru the fiber, or thru a security-enabled out-of-band network connection.

 

Not all of these apply to schools. In fact, I doubt many schools need more than a well-designed NAS farm. A small Catholic school I know gets along very well with a open-source, linux-based NAS using several nodes. Depends on your size, your appetite, and your need for performance.

 

Best of luck

[SimonF]

I beg to differ regarding filesystem sharing on SAN and NAS. It depends on the filesystem not the storage. Windows volumes on a SAN cannot be seen by more than one server typically. However, using VMware for example - volumes have to be shared so VMs can move around.