Anyone got an EMC SAN?

[gshaw]

Just looking at the new EMC VNXe 3100 at the moment, comes in at a very nice price point, good management software and 2011-spec storage controllers and VAAI integration... very tempted!

 

Anyone using EMC here? Any pitfalls in terms of support costs \ licensing?

 

The VNXe seems to include a lot of the licenses with the box inc. de-dupe so seems well aimed at SMB now

[Duke]

Not got one but the EMC stuff has always looked good, they're definitely top-tier with NetApp and one of the few brands I would consider besides Oracle Sun S7000 stuff. Check out exactly what their management 'suite' involves. I've found that a well designed interface on the device itself (i.e. web-based) is usually far nicer than something that has a web-based bit... and an MMC snap-in... and some proprietary stuff... and then bits you need to SSH into it to manage.

 

Can't remember what their licensing is like but it used to be as bad as NetApp, I think they've significantly improved it though. When you get de-dupe, make sure their are no artificial caps or limits set on it. Otherwise, expandability looks pretty decent.

 

Out of interest, any particular reason you didn't want to go for the S7000 stuff?

 

Chris

[Soulfish]

We've got an EMC SAN - a EMC Celerra NS-480 to be exact. We have licenses for NFS, iSCSI, CIFS and FAST Cache on ours. EMCs price came in way below everyone else for much more stuff when we went out for tender last year. We had one of the first implementations world wide of Fast Cache and the new Unisphere single-pane-of-glass management interface.

 

Unisphere (its java/web based) is fairly easy to use to mange the Celerra/Clariion. Doesn't have all of the fancy analytics of an S7000 (we also have one of those ) but gives some nice information anyway. My biggest bug bear is how complex the integration between Celerra and Clariion is, since you actually get both when buying a Celerra. I understand that the VNX/VNXe range has made this a lot simpler and provides a single box essentially. EMC dedupe is a little different from other vendors though, as is their snapshotting. I'd have a read up on both of those areas and see if it matters a great deal to you. All implementations have their pros/cons and I find EMCs implementations a little restrictive at times but their workable solutions at least and we get 80% dedupe savings on our fileshares so it certainly works .

 

Whatever you do though make sure to get all licenses you think you may need included, and try and get as many years support as you can. We have 4 years support on ours (4th year was thrown in free ) and its been pretty good. They actually keep pestering me to get an update run on the system for an issue we're not even experiencing atm (we're not at 90%+ utilisation levels yet!). Any questions just ask

[gshaw]

 

Out of interest, any particular reason you didn't want to go for the S7000 stuff?

 

Chris

 

Just the price really, the S7000s start at something like 14TB which is waaay too big for us and ends up costing an extra 4-5k for storage we won't use. I have to be quite frugal with the pricing in order to get VMWare and Veeam so those few extra k makes a big difference even though you do get a lot of disk for the £££

 

What I like with the VNXe is how much quicker it will be to deploy vs other SANs due to the VMWare integration... if it makes my life easier I'm happy

 

Will see what I can squeeze out of the support

 

Out of interest how are you backing up the Celerra file shares? I can't see a way to do it with our usual backup programs as they all require agents?

[rbance]

Depending on your requirements, also look at IBM XIV technology (the other IBM stuff is crappy or too high-end). I designed and implemented a 4500 user VDI solution using these devices at the storage end. They have all the Tier 1 storage features, but at a Tier 2 type price..ie you do not have to license the additional features separately...

 

For the budget conscious, Thecus have really solid IP Storage (NFS and ISCSI) at really reasonable pricing, and may have all the features you need. I actually have 5 of these in place right now across my two sites...These also support 10GB interfaces....

 

I noticed you are using Veeam. Is that the backup and replication product? If so, then you possibly do not need features that include storage replication in a SAN/NAS type device, and from memory does dedupe at this level...

[rbance]

Also... an 8 bay rackmount Thecus running 8 x 2TB 7200rpm SATA drives comes in at around $5000 AUS.......It equates to roughly 11TB once RAID5 and hot-spare allotments are taken into account....