Best SAN choices

[tom11011]

I've always been a hard core EMC CX series san person. All I've ever known is fiber channel and non-sata drives. However, I cannot ignore the price benefits and new technologies that come with ISCSI.

I would like to pose a few questions.

First, what about the reliability. Over these last few years I have experienced 0 down time where my trusty cx500 with pure fiber channel is concerned. That is money well spent the way I see it. How does iscsi with SATA drive technology compare for the enterprise with SLA and high demands?

Second, what should I even be looking at for a small setup? I would be attaching 3 Dell PE2950s. There are so many SAN brands and vendors I have never heard of.

For a small setup, which would you recommend of the following for a vmware environment. I would like to be able to grow beyond 1 shelf. SAN migration is not a requirement for this project.

Dell AX150i, Dell MD3000i, Equallogic, Left Hand, others?

[matuscak]

For what it's worth, we've had Equallogic SATA and SAS units for about two years now and we've never had anything break. Even version upgrades of the firmware haven't shut down the client systems.

[tom11011]

That's good to know thanks. Equallogic is a dell brand right?

[MattG]

Compellent allows you to do either. Also, since it is a virtual SAN, you can seamlessly integrate shelves of FC and SATA disks without having to choose one type over the other when creating RAID groups. You can create specific RGs on specifics types of disk, but you don't need to.

-MattG

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

[DanDill]

You should probably look at NetApp as well, they have a compelling product that seems to focus more on the features than EMC's offerings from what I've seen.

Of course, now that you've asked this you'll start getting people that work for said vendors throwing out all sorts of info (some of which might even be valid) so watch out for that.

The main limitation of the Equalogics from what I've seen (and possibly the left hands) is that they ONLY do iscsi and have no partitioning capabilities or QoS of any sort. So if a single host is beating up your storage you have no way to control that in the storage fabric. Solution to that is to add another box However for the price they certainly do some very slick stuff...

We're looking at getting rid of our CX-500 eventually as well and there are a lot of different players in the storage market to evaluate. Good luck with your search.

[Cooldude09]

hope this helps too...http://communities.vmware.com//thread/187692?tstart=0

Anil Gupta

Don’t fear changes, its constant in life, reduce your ecological footprint……………………..Go Green

if you found my answer to be useful, feel free to mark it as Helpful or Correct.

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[matuscak]

" Equallogic is a dell brand right?"

Yup, it is now. Dell bought the company something like 18 months ago.

[jguidroz]

We are upgrading our SANs next year from an EMC CX-500. We've been looking at Compellent, Netapp, and HP. My personal preferences are Netapp or Compellent. Both support FC and iSCSI with plans to support FCOE. Netapp gives you NFS (licensed), deduplication, etc. Compellent provides Automated Tiered Storage, great reporting, etc. Both provide better management than EMC. Both need less disks than a comparable SAN from EMC (78 disks from EMC vs 56 for Netapp and 49 for Compellent). There is more software that you can license with Netapp for integration with SQL and Exchange.

I like both Netapp and Compellent and really can't say which way I'm leaning at the moment.

[Kevin_Gao]

My vote is for NetApp if you have the money for it. It's just so powerful and can really deliver everything you need. Only cause of concern is the price tag once you start throwing in the extra licenses / software.

LeftHand is also good for a more affordable solution. It's very easy to setup and manage...DR sites are easily affordable with cheaper LeftHand models or even using VSA.

[meistermn]

3 Catgeories of storage

High End		Customers using storage
1. EMC
2. Hitachi	Brand HP and SUN
3. IBM
Innovation
Netapp
Compellent
3Par
Pillar Data
Newcomers
Aberdeen	http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/vmware.htm
Coraid	http://www.coraid.com/	http://www.coraid.com/COMPANY/Customer-List;jsessionid=0a0101421f43de8cc96439eb4e6f8999e0538e512a08....

[crazex]

I agree that Compellent is a great product. It is a bit more expensive than the solutions originally listed (Equalogic, AX150, etc). That being said, it does offer quite a bit more feature wise. We've had our Storage Center for almost 3 years now, and it has run flawlessly. We've already gone through an upgrade, so we now have 3 tiers of storage (FC, FATA, SATA). We run both our VI3 envrionment and our Lab Manager environment on the Storage Center and it works great. Our VI3 cluster is connected via FC and our Lab Manager is connected via iSCSI. One feature that goes by the wayside, at least until vSphere 4 is released, is the thin provisioning of the disk. All in all, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Compellent solution to anybody, but I'm just not sure how much the OP is looking to spend.

-Jon-

VMware Certified Professional

[AndreTheGiant]

The choise depend also of your budget, the actual number of VM (and disk I/O rate), the future grow of your infrastructure.

I used several Dell products and for "small solution" with 2 or 3 node a storage like MD3000i with 2 controller and SAS disk can work fine.

But if you can growof you plan to implement a disaster recovery based on VMware SRM, then you need a storage with replication feature. In this case Dell-Equallogic can be a good solution, because has all the software feature enabled by default at no extra cost.

Andrea

[SunnyC]

I've several customer indicating that IBM's DS3000 series works well also. You might want to keep that in mind as well.

[digitalex]

I would recommend Compellant or HP EVA. :smileygrin:

[DanDill]

I would recommend outright ignoring any advice from a) someone who says product X is what you should buy or b) anyone that works for a storage vendor. Both are probably not very helpful and/or unbiased.

[digitalex]

Vendors are not allowed to post in the forums without first notifying those that they do work for said vendor. Im giving my option based on using particular storage devices for many years. I cannot say which one is better cause that would be bias but I can only recommend what I would do.

[NWhiley]

You need to consider the IOPS you need to support your infrastructure.

Once you have an idea on that, you will be able to home in on a range of products.

There are loads out there, all very capable. Try and get to see the management software too if you can, as this may help you choose.

Remember, its all about IOPS which translates into spindles. How many do you need?

[Kevin_Gao]

IOPS is an important key to the selection of the right SAN...but I think other SAN features can also be key points.

i.e.: Do you want your SAN to dedup your primary storage? Do you want your SAN to have the capability to deliver iSCSI + FC + NFS + CIFS protocols? Does your SAN have to have easy upgrade paths or can you live with a fork-list upgrade (who would pick this really)

With the current economic situation...budget has become a huge factor as well in the selection of SAN's. We recently purchased a NetApp but realized that we'll have to wait before we load it up with additional software licenses due to the added cost. So it boils down to what you're looking for in your new SAN...and how much are you willing to pay to get it.

[DanDill]

yeah my previous post (while applicable in general) was mainly triggered by SunnyC from IBM's comment, didn't mean to direct that at you and should have replied to his posting, not yours.

Sorry bout that!

[JohnADCO]

Your san models you list are covering a wide range of differing costs and capabilities.

I'll just say if you set a budget, it narrows the field down pretty quickly. I mean, if you don't have a lot of budget, something like an MD3000i may be all you can really afford.