New SAN Purchase - Advice?

[desp59]

I am going to be purchasing the first SAN for my company shortly and I would like some advice. Right now I am leaning towards an EMC solution but I want to make sure I am not missing anything.

The environment is going to start as two ESX servers and will be growing but I would not think more than 10 in the lifetime of this SAN. There will be Exchange and SQL running on virtual machines from this so disk performance is definitely an issue. Right now it is a very small group of users (30ish) but that will be growing. If it gets to be too much, I will be forced to move Exchange and SQL off of Vmware so I am aware of this. I have heard all kinds of numbers on this so I will have to see when that is required.

I have been given a price of in the $20,000's for a complete CX300 fiber solution. This includes switches and HBAs for the servers and this seems like a good deal to me. I am also debating a 3-10c for in the $30,000's. I like the combination of iSCSI and Fiber but I am not sure it is worth the extra expense there. The fiber is also 4GB in the 3-10c but once again, not sure if that is worth the money.

Am I missing any other good, redundant solutions out there in this price range? Everyone talks about the Equillogic arrays but the PS100E is the first one with redundant storage controllers and from what I can tell, that is in the $40,000's.

I would appreciate any comments anyone has on this. Thank you.

[letoatrads]

I think you must be seeing the PS-100e on either old pricing or don't have a decent vendor. I've seen pricing for these sub 30K. Feel free to throw me a PM and I can pass on the vendor info to you.

[acr]

You have a lot of choices for both FC and iSCSI..

Which ever way you go, check out licensing costs for Replication, this can often be charged at each end, check Snap Licensing some vendors charge for restoring the Snap at a remote end..

Find out year 4 and 5 support costs, this one always scares those vendors that broke the bank to get the SAN in as its when they will claim most of it back..

IMHO EqualLogic win on most of these fronts..

[gogogo5]

I'd be interested to know the raw and useable storage capacity you will get for the $20,000 CX300.

We are about to evaluate an EqualLogic PS100E for use at our DR site. The good thing about the EqualLogic architecture is that when you need to add more storage down the road you simply add another PS series array and the system automatically re-stripes your data across all useable disks in both units. This increases performance from the more spindles available.

Also when you add additional units you are doubling, tripling the storage processing capacity since each shelf has its own SPs.

[acr]

may be worth a read..

Colorado State picks EqualLogic over EMC for Exchange[/url]

Message was edited by:

ken.cline@hp.com to shorten the URL

[doubleH]

here is a great link to an article from searchstorage (it's 5 pages). this is a [i]user[/i][/b] survery about all the different storage vendors and EqualLogic came out on top. this is not an article by some biased guy in a lab. this article pushed me over the edge to make the decision to purchase an EqualLogic solution.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci1234999,00.html

as for that price for an EqualLogic solution... that is way high and i'm saying that from a canadian funds perspective. that may be list, but you can get it for much, much less.

[badazws6]

Have you thought about the new IBM DS3400? You can think of it as a baby DS4000 series. It is strictly Fiber but I think that is the best option to begin with. Also, it has 4 host ports so you can connect your two ESX boxes up directly and pay as you grow in the future. It will grow up to 14 TB and beat the pants off a CX300 as far as performance.

[badazws6]

A IBM DS3400 (think of it as a baby DS4000 series) would also fall in this price range but you would need to buy at least one SAN switch to support more then two physical machines. It should also beat the pants off of a CX300 as far as performance.

[infuseweb]

Take a look at the NetApp Storevault S500. www.storevault.com. $15K gets you a really nice setup.

[wbeckwith]

I just went through this very exercise. Didn't know jack about a SAN, but we were buying a full blade enclosure and felt that the real benefit came from having a SAN. I spent approx. 2 months in these forums and reading every scap of info I could on how to spend the money we had budgeted. We ended up with the Dell | EMC CX3-10c and the EQL PS100E as being the finalists. Ultimately we went with EQL because the setup is simple, management is even easier and performance rocks. However, we didn't buy the PS100E, instead we bought 2 PS50Es and just installed all the drives in a single PS50E. Thus we have another PS50E to which we can now add drives to. Actually if you didn't want to keep the 2nd PS50E, you could pull the controller from it and pop it into the 1st PS50E and have a PS100E, all for only 1K more than buying a PS100E direct. The thing that is going to bite you with some others, is the additional software functionality. You want SnapView with the CX3-10c? Ka-ching!, there goes a big chunk of money.

I'd advise you to get a demo unit, and run some tests. Since we had real data on the demo unit by the time our bought units arrived, weI just added the new member to the current SAN group, and waited for it to restripe the data across the 2 units and then turned around and removed the demo unit from the SAN group. We didn't even warn anyone that we were going to do that as one of the selling features was that this type of operation was suppose to be transparent and this was our 1st chance to verify it. The running VMs continued to run and no user complained of performance, so I give EQL an A+ in this category.

The biggest problem I have with a SAN is the same I have with a new hard drive, we seem to find more stuff to put on it, that we'll like be expanding it before the summers out at this rate.

[InsaneGeek]

To acurately make any statement we'd probably need to more information about your I/O needs. What are your requirements from a disk performance perspective, functionality, growth capacity, availability, etc.

Without more details (software: volumelogix, snapshot, etc, hardware: what kind of switches & HBA's), I'd say you are getting an excellent price... with a very big caveat the CX300 is being sales deprecated, which as with all things dropping out of sales means that support costs will start getting very, very expensive from the vendor as the years move forward, make sure to get 2 & 3 years support costs (and is probably the reason you are getting such a good price on it).

Exchange & SQL are generally both fairly disk intensive (but it depends upon the load... seen both low and high), so think more spindles. No matter the storage array, unless you've got enough spindles to handle the inbound writes you'll fill up your write cache and be forced into straight through to disk which will be horrible performance from any vendor.

As the CX300 is no longer be sold by EMC, unless it has a good number more spindles than the equalogic, I'd probably go with equalogic just from a risk aversion perspective, in case you need future expansion, etc.

I've been running EMC CX700's for a number of years now with good luck (just a bigger model of a CX300), if you have any specific questions I can take a stab at them.

[InsaneGeek]

I should also say: my understanding is that the CX300 isn't end of sales yet... but later this year will be, so things will be around for awhile still. Also my understanding is that the CX300 can be upgraded to a newer CX3 ultrascale model, if you want in the future.

So it's not quite as dead as I was giving an impression of in the partent post... but still it's being deprecated having said that it's a great deal on a piece of hardware that should have very good I/O performance if you get the equal number of spindles, go with equalogic, if you get more I'd give the CX300 a look...

[desp59]

My price for the CX300 includes 3 years of support with 4 hour response time. It also includes two Brocade 200E fiber switches (16 port but only 8 unlocked) and 4 Qlogic 2460s. It only includes Navisphere for 0-2 hosts as well so I will need to upgrade that. No Snapview Mirrorview etc but we are not going to be using any of those features anytime soon anyway.

This is going to start out servicing around 30-50 users right away and within a year or two could easily grow to servicing 200+ users. Sql, Exchange, File and terminal servers will all be on this SAN that I purchase.

I would say my priority is performance with this SAN. I also need it to be extremely available and redundant. Anything in the 3-4 TB range should keep me more than occupied for a while as far as storage is concerned.

Any other views based on this? Thank you everyone for the input!

[gogogo5]

How much storage will you be getting shipped with this price?

[infuseweb]

EDIT: Sorry, thought you were talking to me the way the e-mail notification read.

That came with 8 of 12 drives, each being 500GB SATA. I questioned how good the performance would be with SATA drives, but the way they build their SANs it's supposedly very good performance. I had mine set up for dual parity with a hot spare, leaving me with about 1.8 TB usable. You can set it up differently and get more storage out of the same config, but the dual parity with the hot spare lets me lose up to 3 drives, if I'm correct, and I'm still ok plus the peformance is good.

I went with iSCSI so it came with 2 ethernet ports (I believe standard) and I added the SCSI card to allow me to back up directly to tape from the unit. You can add a Fiber card at any time (for extra cost, of course) if that's your preferred method.

That price also included some promotions they're running right now. $500 off the dual parity setup, free SnapRestore which does all the snapshotting, and 50% off their replication software if you decide you want to add a second box then mirror the two.

Message was edited by:

infuseweb

[glynnd1]

from the point of view of choosing between the CX300 and the CX3-10 at those prices I'd lean towards the CX3-10.

I don't have performance metrics that compare the two boxes, but I have the impression that the CX3-10 is just a cut down CX3-20, and I do have performance metrics that compare the CX300 to the CX3-20 and show a greater the doubling in performance (2x to 2.5x depending on the metric).

Having said that how much of the CX3-20 was cut out of it to make the CX3-10 I don't know. We do know the cache is halved (4gb down to 2gb), the number of front end ports is reduced (12FC + 8iSCSI down to 4FC + 4iSCSI) and the max number of drives is halved (120 to 60).

These reductions make it quiet similar to the CX300, though you get both FC & iSCSI on the CX3-10, so why spend the extra on the CX3-10? I'd spend it based on life span, the CX300 has been around for quiet a while, EMC have already replace the CX500 and CX700 with other CX3-xx, so peraumable the CX300 is due to be replaced soon. While EMC will continue to support it for some time, that time is going to be shorter then a product that they recently brought to market. Having said that I believe EMC will continue to stock spare parts for 5 years after they stop selling a product.

[desp59]

The CX300 and 3-10c both ship with 10 146GB drives.