Annual Cost of SAN Maintenance; do you subscribe to it?

[see2k]

I've been working with a couple of vendors to get a SAN solution for my VM infrastructure.

I am having a bit of difficulty dealing with the initial cost of investment but then the annual cost doesn't make it any more easier to absorb.

I have two vendors so far, Compellent and Hitachi whom have an anual cost of 6000 dollars (for a primary site) and another 8000 for an offsite replication unit for software/hardware maintenance support. Is this something that you guys take into consideration when purchasing a SAN, and how do I go about justifying this cost when the point of a SAN was to consolidate costs and removing the need of new servers every so often.

Being an education outfit is it just simpler for me to continue to use iSCSI with a Dell Storage solution then to move to a dedicated SAN? I really wanted to do the offsite replication to ween us away from using tapes all the time (which in itself is pricey per year) and to take advantage of the Performance a Fiber Channel SAN provides. Overall my target sustained IOPS is 1800 with 100mbytes/s transfers.

So what have you done in order to keep annual costs down or justification for it, and or do you subscribe to the hardware/software contracts to these SAN vendors?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

If your SAN is business critical then the support is a must. Vendors will not even speak to you without a support agreement. Remember quite a bit can go wrong and when you do need that help you need them to be there for you.

There are other ways to do off-site backups without a LUN to LUN copy as well. You could use tools built directly into ESX (vcbMounter) using a long distance NFS/iSCSI mount. Or VIBSU if you do not want to write your own. For more network style tools you can look into vRangerPro (which I use), esxExpress, and a host of other tools.

The main thing is to get a copy of the data to a remote storage solution on a regular basis. I tend to tie this into my backup solution. I do a disk to disk to tape scenario. Before writing to tape I can hook in and send the vRangerPro produced files to be restored to a remote server.

I do not think you can get rid of tape 100% but you can use backup technology to do a point in time copy at a hotsite. Not as nice as a full mirror but will cover your bases for you.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074