EMC NS40 vs. 3Par Storage

[flempitsky]

We are considering 3Par for our Virtual Infrastructure. I like their product and the ability to do fiber channel or iSCSI. Our CIO has a close relationship with EMC and always wants to see what EMC offers in the same space. They are pushing the NS40 because it now does Thin provisioning using wome sort of Volume Manager that lives on their NAS OS called DART. What are peoples opinions on both technologies. I ahev used the EMc Celerra in tha past and always had issues of some sort. This effort is because we are trying to consolidate storage Silos that have been created.

Any thought would be great.

thanks

Frank

[mcowger]

We've evaluated both solutions, and we were FAR more impressed with the underlying design and implmentation of the 3Par gear as compared to the EMC.

--Matt

[eabeukes]

The place I am at now has 3 of the 3Par SAN's out and bar some software upgrades its simply a fit-and-forget solution. 3Par even went as far as letting us borrow disks from their development systems when we ran out of space during a migration! We are retiring as many of our EVA and MSA's as we can and pushing clients over to the 3Par's. The tech guys are really really good as well - genuinely know their stuff...

[korman]

I have been working with EMC Clariion and/or Symmetrix Storage arrays for about 5 years. Currently Clariion storage is used in our Lab and Symmetrix in production. In recent months I have been looking at a storage systems for a production tier of storage to run along side of the Symmetrix and have been blown away by the offerings by Storage Virtualization vendors. I have been calling the project the "Tier1-V Storage Implementation" internally because as soon as you say Tier2 the application owners frown on having apps on anything but Symmetrix. The inception of Tier1-V centered around that fact that Storage Virtualization and companies like 3Par, Compellent, Dell Equallogics, Pillar, etc.. offer many of features that EMC sells ala-cart (and more) in thier Clariion and Symmetrix storage platforms but at a fraction of the cost. I looked closely at 3PARs InServ and a handful of other arrays including the EMC Cellera NS40. This is my opinion, but I thought the NS40 was one of the worst offering and I routinely refered to at the "Franken-SAN". Two operating environments with Two management and provisioning GUIs , 1 from Dart and one from Flare. Two replication technologies one for ISCSI/CIFS/NFS and one for Fibre Channel.