VMware Cloud Community
The_Bublitz
Contributor
Contributor

IBM V3700 SAN experience and thoughts?

We need to purchase a new SAN this year, and I am doing research.  Does anyone have experience or opinions on the IBM V3700 yet?  It was just released in November of 2012, and so far the price and features seem to look tempting vs the other SANs we have looked at.

List of SANs we're looking at directly below, with current setup and priorities below that.  Any help is appreciated!

IBM V3700

Dell MD3620i

EMC VNXE 3300

HP StoreVirtual VSA (would build on Dell R720)

Nimble CS220

Dell Equal Logic PS4110

We run around 25 VM's on Vsphere, on 2 hosts (an R710 and an R720).  The IO hungry VM's would be SQL logging and controls for factory machines, as well as the SQL backend for sharepoint.

Running HA via iSCSI to our current aging SAN - a Dell MD3000i - currently with 19 3.5" 15k SAS drives.  Pretty standard setup with 2 controllers, going to 2 separate switches for redundant pathing.

Requirements:

     Faster than current setup - obviously want to try to take a step forward in speed.

     Price - V3700 and MD3620i are front-runners in price. The others are a stretch on the budget depending on features.

     5 year window - needs to be flexible enough to support us for 5 years

          This would include 10gb capability (not necessary yet)

          This would include ability to add SSD's, include possible tiering/cacheing features

          This means it should stay on VMware's HCL for 5 years

     Ability to add capacity or speed (we do NOT need a ton of space currently - maybe 2-3TB of real data)

               (Data size is growing linearly and not exponentially)

     Warranty and customer support

Bonus points for features - especially speed features.  The V3700 EasyTier feature looks interesting, but I don't know much about AND it's not even available yet.

Thanks! I know there a lot of what if's - so especially interested in those with experience in v3700, or perhaps v7000 (big brother to v3700).

V3700 info - https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/accelerate/resource/Accelerate_w_ATS_V3700...

Reply
0 Kudos
13 Replies
SophieNics1978
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

We can help with this, contact Dalida Moger from Response Data Communications on 0207 871 0800 or email her at dalida.moger@rdc.uk.com and she can put you in touch with the technology experts, or put you in touch with the right people who can answer your questions.

Hope this helps

Best regards, Sophie

Reply
0 Kudos
honeybadgerIT
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Bublitz,

We were looking for a similiar SAN for a two host VMware cluster and the v3700 was at the top of our list with the ExpressPod, that has a NetApp. We ended up with the v3700 because of price/features/expandability.  We also liked the fact that we could do direct attached fiber (8Gb) and eliminate any iSCSI switches from the price.

We just received it this week and setup has been very straight forward.  We got it with the SFF drives, and for 2U of rack space it really is a nice little unit.  I like the GUI as well.  We have two HP 385P's with the 16 core AMD's, so a lot of capacity in 6U worth of space.

Anyway, so far so good...we got a lot for what we paid.

Reply
0 Kudos
The_Bublitz
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks honeybadgerIT - good to hear your experience so far has been good.  The price/performance/expandability/options ratio is quite good.

If you have any helpful hints or good/bad things to report it'd be great to hear them!  Since it is so new I haven't seen many posts on it yet.

Reply
0 Kudos
Josh26
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

The Bublitz wrote:

HP StoreVirtual VSA (would build on Dell R720)


Just a side comment... I can't see how it's an "Apples to apples" to compare a bunch of hardware SANs to an HP software solution, placed on a Dell. Surely the more appropriate device to review would be a StoreVirtual hardware solution?

Reply
0 Kudos
Josh26
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

SophieNics1978 wrote:

Hi,

We can help with this, contact Dalida Moger from Response Data Communications on 0207 871 0800 or email her at dalida.moger@rdc.uk.com and she can put you in touch with the technology experts, or put you in touch with the right people who can answer your questions.

Hope this helps

Best regards, Sophie

Unless you literally offering free telephone based technical support, it's incredibly obnoxious to put a sales pitch on a technical forum. Particularly given your only other post was a copy and paste of the exact same spam. I sincerely hope the use of such marketing practices does not reflect the attitudes of the business in general.

Given that your website is covered Nimble literature, can I conclude that's what your technology experts will recommend?

Reply
0 Kudos
DrDomino
Contributor
Contributor

Just adding my 2 cents worth.  I just bought an IBM V3700, and so far the experience has been positive.

The only problem I had was that the setup process, which is supposed to automatically configure the unit's network connections, didn't work as described.  I ended up skipping the automated process, connected directly to the service port and manually configured the connections.  No big deal.

Looks to me like unit's capabilities are superior to it's competition, and the GUI is well designed.  IBM provides a plug-in to manage the V3700 with VCenter, but I haven't installed that yet.

The V3700 does a great job of taking the complexity out of storage management.  I vote two thumbs up.

Reply
0 Kudos
honeybadgerIT
Contributor
Contributor

I actually had the opposite experience with the USB stick.  I setup the management confguration on my laptop with the USB, and then plugged it into one of the controllers in the back of the v3700, and bang it was setup with a management IP.  Whatever you use to config the USB has to be on the same subnet.

This is the first IBM hardware I have used.  My only complaints would be the learning curve on getting the unit registered and dealing with the IBM website/support process.   It appears it has a bad power supply, but not a huge issue as support is going to swap it out.

Reply
0 Kudos
DrDomino
Contributor
Contributor

Our V3700 was an early production unit.  I think my inital configuration issue was related to that early microcode, as it would "see" the USB stick and would appear to work, but would not save the management IP settings.  Glad to hear it worked for you, so I assume the microcode is fixed now.  Anyway, it was no big deal, just had to connect to the service port and use it's GUI to set the IP for the management port.

Reply
0 Kudos
The_Bublitz
Contributor
Contributor

Our proposal for a V3700 has been approved - I will try and come back and update our experience as I set it up.  We will have some SSD space that I may run our SQL server on, though I'm hoping it will be more useful when IBM comes out with the optional "Easy Tier" function.

Josh26 - it was not supposed to be apples to apples, it was simply a list of options we were considering.  The HP VSA's main selling point was the flexibility it allowed in building your own hardware - depending on the configuration you could save a lot of $$ or get a lot more hardware.

Reply
0 Kudos
siegfriedLH
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I've bought a V3700 at the end of february. I've put 17 SSF 600 GO 10k in raid 10 and i'm very happy with this SAN.

I'm running 3 ESXi with 30 VM on it.

Reply
0 Kudos
AzNY
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What are the are VMs used for - FileServer, SQL, Exchange -  how many people are accessing it during business hours? Are there any latencies; read, write, queue length ?

Reply
0 Kudos
The_Bublitz
Contributor
Contributor

I have been testing our V3700 - so far pretty good, though I am having some trouble with sequential read speed.  Write speed and random is fine, but sequential SINGLE threaded read seems to max out around 68MB/s no matter what.  My old MD3000i with a similar setup can run a little over 100 (theoretical being around 120 on gigabit).

MPIO seems to work great, and the web interface is smooth and quick.  I may call IBM to see if they have some advice for me. I think it may be a TCP fragment or ACK issue (I've tried jumbo frames and Delayed Ack). 

Have 19 600gb 10k 2.5" drives and 3 200gb SSD's to test with.   Running the included 4 gigabit ports (no additional ports). 

Reply
0 Kudos
kidnerknechtj
Contributor
Contributor

6 V3700's here all with about 60 or so TB..

Run 11 ESX hosts about 170 servers and both 5.0 and 5.5 esx hosts on IBM x3650Mx Series dual 10core 256gb ram each and no issues. Runs like a BEAST!

Reply
0 Kudos