Which SAN to choose...?

[bcominotti]

Hello everybody,

Our company has a need to expand the storage space, we have 3 offers with comparable prices, does anyone know which of these devices offer the best performance?

Netapp FAS2040A (iscsi + FC + CIFS + NFS)

Hitachi AMS2100  (iscsi + FC)

HP P2000 G3 iscsi MSA (iscsi only)

We do not really need to use the storage as NAS or via NFS, we are interested primarly on the performances with our Vsphere infrastructure.

Thanks,

Bruno Cominotti

[sketchy00]

If you are primarily interested in block based iSCSI storage, you might want to look at EqualLogic.

[Josh26]

bcominotti wrote:

HP P2000 G3 iscsi MSA (iscsi only)

Thanks,

Bruno Cominotti

Just clarifying... that SAN does both iSCSI and FC, if you choose the "combo" unit. If you've already got a fibre infrastructure, I don't see why you wouldn't use it.

If you don't already have a fibre infrastrucutre, remember that's a heavy portion of the price if you choose to use FC.

It's really not fair to ask "which unit is faster" however, particularly if you appear to be comparing one SAN using iSCSI to another using FC. Aside from FC generally being faster than iSCSI, there's a wide range of configuration options on all of these, and there's going to be a report from each vendor showing why they are faster.

Concentrate on the features you want, starting with which connectivity option.

[hbato]

Hi bcominotti,

Welcome to the community.

I would personally recommend Netapp FAS2040A (iscsi + FC + CIFS + NFS). First is that it is just a rank behind EMC (#1 in storage) and second it is one of the best SAN appliance out there. And for your solution, I would highly recommend use of FC which is faster than iSCSI.

Regards, Harold

[troy1]

Bruno,

We went with the new EMC VNX line which combines FC, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS (similiar to your netapp array).  When you go with a unit that can do block level storage and file level it can really come in handy.  For instance, you can put up a development/testing environment without buying additional two thousand dollar dual port HBAs for each server and you can use old hardware for a clustered VMware environment.  You can also mount NFS and CIFS data stores to existing non VM servers to get immediate storage capacity without buying FC HBA's. You will not get the performance of FC but you may not have the IOPS requirements for it.

In reality, most modern arrays perform at about the same level, it just comes down to how many hard drives you put in the unit. The more hard drives and spindles you have in a storage pool or raid group the more performance you are going to get. If you don't have it designed properly for your environment, no matter which unit you get, you could suffer.

[meistermn]

How many IOPS?

How many throughput ?

Are critical Vm's virtualized ?

Better look at modern storage solutions.

http://www.whiptail.com/2012/01/amd-replaces-disk-with-solid-state-arrays

http://go.tintri.com/l/6022/2011-10-16/1VYZU

http://www.purestorage.com/

[bcominotti]

Troy1, you hit the target...

we actually have an HDS AMS200 connected via FC (redundant switches) to our Vmware cluster, each host with 2 hba.

Now the AMS200 is EOL, no more upgradable, so we're looking for an additional storage, here is the choice of iSCSI as it is less expensive, as we don't have to buy additional FC port license on the 2 brocade switch.

If we choose iscsi, we could also recover some old servers and use them for our test environments, freeing resources on the production cluster.

My question was just wondering if anyone had been able to compare these devices, or at least know them directly.

Bruno

[bcominotti]

Hi Meistermn,

thank you for the links, very interesting the Purestorage, do you have some info about the price? ;-))

For the other questions: we are primarly interested in storage space, as the more critical I/O applications will remain on the FC SAN that we actually use, we are obviously interested also to the performance, so we are searching infos that can help us to choose.

We already use NETAPP in other environment (our customer) so we know it, but in our environment the "multiprotocol" capabilities is not very important.

Thanks,

Bruno

[bcominotti]

Hello Josh26,

Just clarifying... that SAN does both iSCSI and FC, if you choose the "combo" unit. If you've already got a fibre infrastructure, I don't see why you wouldn't use it.

ok, but the one offered to me has only iscsi

If you don't already have a fibre infrastrucutre, remember that's a heavy portion of the price if you choose to use FC.

we do have fiber infrastructure, but we wanto to add another storage appliance without buying additional license for the FC switches and without buying additional FC HBA for the other servers we want to reuse...

Concentrate on the features you want, starting with which connectivity option.

You're right, in my first message I had not specified that we are looking for an appliance iscsi, sellers have come with theseproposals.

Bruno

[davidbewernick]

Hi,

ever though of a DataCore installation? You could reuse your existing storage and attach it to the DataCore Server. If you need more space, just add some basic disk shelfs to it and serve slow and fast to whatever you want with FC or iSCSI.

f.e. you could get a HP DL370 G6 with 2 dual port FC HBAs. One to attached the existing storage and the other as a target for the FC SAN. Than you will kick another 22 disks into the server and use this as the new storage. If you need even more, put a HP MDS600 under it, fill it with 75 disks and be happy (This can be multiplicated)! To get the ultimate feeling, you could add a FusionIO Card to the server and use autotiering. 😃

Ok, this sounds a bit easy but if you would give more details about IOPS, needed TBs and so on it might be easier to answer.

[JohnADCO]

We are newly Datacore installed.    Sansymphony-V is an uber cool product indeed.     I hope he comes back and lets us know what he went with.