Diskless SAN purchase?

[caustic386]

Can anyone recommend a highly available SAN that's sold without disks? I'd like to bring my own disks to the table, as I have some sort of philosophical issue with paying EMC (or whoever) 3x the drive value just because they put an extra chunk of firmware on them. InforTrend seems to be the best option I've found - 2.5" would be great as I'm looking to use SSD, but not a requirement.

This will be for a MS cluster primarily, but VMware qualified sure wouldn't be a downside!

[admin]

actually were running starwind enterprise but only for one of our dev environments. All the rest of the environment is equallogic ps6000xv arrays. Were running starwind on windows 2008.

[DCasota]

Sorry for the long delay.

We didn't have to many issues with the Infortrend support. We had to replace two disks in our disk array a12u-g2421 within two years. Both were delivered within three days (delivery from Germany to Switzerland is a little bit complicated...) However, the recreation took almost a day.

For firmware and software updates we used their online site (http://esupport.infortrend.com.tw ). The major reason that we switched to another san storage (equallogic) was the missing support for an esx-based environment (3-4 years ago) and an expanding virtual infrastructure.

[caustic386]

Dcasota,

Did you buy those drives with your InforTrend? Their HCL is a little weird - there's a disclaimer at the bottom that says even though the drives are on the HCL, they're still not "guaranteed." that's the only thing giving me pause in that direction.

Scott_k,

How does the performance of your Starwind rig hold up to your Equallogics?

[DCasota · Accepted solution]

Yes, all disks were from Infortrend, the price was ok and the guarantee period, too (3 years).

[caustic386]

Thanks to everyone that weighed in - looks like it's down to SANmelody or Infortrend. Only testing will tell!

[_VR_]

You can take a look at these as well:

http://www.promise.com/