Choosing SAN, experiences/advise? EQL, EVA

[pytrehau1000]

We're currently considering offers on replacing our SAN, EMC CX300 FC. It seems to be coming down to HP EVA4400 (fc) and Dell Equallogic PS6000X (iscsi). We are 200 employees and about 90% virtualized with 30 servers on three esx 4.0 hosts, amongst them Exch2007, SQL, DC's and file servers.

HP is selling EVA on good stability and performance, but Dell thinks EVA  is outdated and with less real performance even compared to their  SATA-shelf and fewer disks. EQL also has the advantages of delivering with all features  included and better vsphere integration.

Anyone having experiences with these SANs with relevant advise on our decision?  Also what is your opinions on fc vs iscsi?

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Usually this is the HP LEfthand and Dell EQ fight, but the EVA version is a bit different.  The key is to listen to what the vendors claim the differences are and then try to find the true meaning of these differences.  FC is going to be the performance king (see the "Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance in VMware vSphere 4" whitepaper) but it will come with additional complexity.

Dell has a solid point on their all-inclusive licensing, and that would be one thing to look at very carefully with the EVA.  Those additional costs with HP can get very high very fast.  Dell also has a jump on rolling out VAAI over HP, unless I have missed something.

I have used both of these and they are both very good.  The key is finding the one that works best in your environment, with your staff and with your budget.

Good Luck!

[meistermn]

Why not go still with X86 servers and a software san?

What is the slowest component ?

Disk

HAve a look at fusionio. IS it better to invest in game changer ?

http://www.fusionio.com/

Combined it with www.seanodes.com

http://www.seanodes.com/sites/default/files/Exanodes%20for%20VMware%20Product%20Brochure.pdf

http://www.seanodes.com/exanodes-multi-platform-virtual-san-solution/exanodes-vmware

http://www.seanodes.com/solutions/shared-internal-storage

Or combined datacore with fusionio

http://www.datacore.com/

http://www.datacore.com/Company/News/Press-Releases/10-07-28/DataCore_Virtualizes_FusionIO_Solid_Sta...

[vela13007777]

HP lefthand doesnt do Multipathing across the nodes either ragardless of what they tell you. Max throughput you will get from a lun is 220mb. Latency is also not the best from what testing I did.

Don't profess to know much about dell.

Have you considered an EMC Clariion? with them being shelved next year there are some good deals to be had.. just keep playing one off against the other and the price should go more your way.

EMC have tight integration  with vsphere and vaai, to be expected really as EMC own vmware.

The clariion also does multi protocol.

[vela13007777]

forgot to say.. EVA is dead. Long live 3par.

[logiboy123]

Lefthand does do multipathing. It's just a little more complex to setup then standard configurations. The following are walkthroughs specifically for Multipath IO on a P4000 within a vSphere environment.

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-0261ENW.pdf

http://virtualy-anything.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-configure-vsphere-mpio-for-iscsi.html

The reason that HP bought Lefthand is because the P4000 software is awesome. It is;

1) Easy to install

2) Easy to configure

3) Easy to maintain

4) Easy to secure

5) Efficient at multipurpose workloads.

6) Fully featured by default out of the box

FC is dying because iSCSI is so much cheaper. I live and work in New Zealand where a large company is still only 1000 seats. Most of our customers are buying the P4000 because they are in a single word awesome. Bigger customers usually think along the lines of Clarrion, XIV or 3PAR.

Don't get me wrong. I love FC, it is an awesome product. But it is expensive and unweildly and on my cost for benifit ratio iSCSI is beating it every year. If a customer has FC infrastructure they can leverage without buying too much extra kit, then I'll work up a design to incorporate it. But many of my engagements this year have meant customers bringing in iSCSI. Usually the budget is the cause of this.

As a side note; where have the preview and spellcheaker buttons gone?

[Josh26]

Hi,

I would start by asking what servers you have.

Sure, a Dell SAN _should_ work with an HP server, but good luck getting either vendor to not just blame the other one when there's a connectivity issue. The whole environment needs to be looked at here. If you're comparing the EVA, you're going to need Fibre Switches. If you're looking at iSCSI, you'll need appropriate network switches. Do you have either already in place and how does the budget on these two things affect your decision?

You're on the right path though, stick with enterprise solutions and either of them will lead to enterprise results.

[needmorstuff007]

question.. have you ever had more than 220MB/s of throughput to more than 2 nodes with 4 iscsi 1gb ports bound together? I ask as I evald a p4000 a few months ago and saw this as a top speed so i asked the question of someone at HP who actually knew and he at the time said "MPIO is expected later in the year"

I know you can bind multiple 1gb ports together but you could not at the time read or write to a volume on more than 1 node.

[AndreTheGiant]

Equallogic is an active/standby controller, so you cannot have 4 active NIC on a PS4000 series (that has only 2 iSCSI NIC for controller).

With a good tuning, yes you can have more throughput.

But you have to configure the storage as recommended on Equallogic site.

Andre

[Dr_Virt]

I just finished a deployment with Lefthand storage arrays and vSphere 4.1. After upgrading the entire array in a few clicks, the VAAI enabled update delivered outstanding performance from the Lefthand storage.

I then used IOmeter to routinely see more than 800MB/s of I/O from redundant shelves. I have been truly impressed with our Lefthand series this far.

We also went HP for the entire configuration (the quote beat the competition by a wide margin). The delivered solution worked very well together. I was even impressed by the performance and simplicity of the HP ProCurve iSCSI storage fabric (not to mention the savings over Cisco).

I would recommend continuing to compare the EQL with Lefthand, but drop the EVA.

[jslarouche]

Stay away from getting HP EVA's. We've got 4 of them, two 8400's and two 8000's. They are completly unrealizable and they tend to reboot themselves whenever they want with no apparent root cause.. Beware..

[EshuunDara]

I've got 4 Equallogics and they're great.  They're easy to setup, manage and expand (add extra storage).  That said, there are a few limits with the Equallogic that you won't run into with EMC or NetApp.  They don't do deduplication, and they can't configure individual LUNs with different RAID configurations.   You can't create a LUN with RAID 10 and a LUN with RAID5 -- you set the raid configuration per POOL (which may be one EQ array or more).   Each volume/LUN spans the entire pool, which is great for redundancy and expandibility, but you can't setup a 6 disk RAID 10 volume for your SQL Servers and use the rest a RAID50 setup.

[hdcd]

Couldn't be further from the truth. We have had an EVA3000 (1st gen), and only had 4 drives go

bad in the past 5 years. Never a reboot. Now we have a EVA4400, never an issue. If anyone is

interested in an EVA they are rock solid and very easy to administer. The 8400's run basically

the same code as the 4400's, just different controllers.