Which SAN?

[cw808s]

Hi There,

We are currently in discussions about virtualisaing our infrastructure. More or less everything has been decided apart from the SAN. We have had companies come in and pitch solutions to us. It is not a massive infrastructure, there will be about 15 virtual servers running on about 2-3 physical servers. We currently have around 1.5TB of storage needs and obviously a bit more once we virtualise. The products that people have pitched are:

Company one

NetApp FAS2020 1 £18,775.00

VMware addon 1 £2,442.71

Exchange addon 1 £4,147.75

Single mailbox recovery 1 £1,040.40

Company Two

StoreVault S550 Base System - Discription below 2 £2,780.00

StoreVault 500GB HDD, SATA II, 7200RPM 12 £292.00

StoreVault S550 Series Rack Mount Kit 2 £89.00

StoreVault S550 Series CIFS License, unlimited user 2 £181.00

StoreVault S550 Series SnapRestore License, SVE 2 £620.00

StoreVault S550 Series Replication software license 2 £775.00

StoreVault S5xx Series SnapManager Exchange SVE 2 £1,030.00

StoreVault S5xx Series SnapManager SQL SVE 2 £1,030.00

Company Three

StorageWorks, do not yet have the price.

The NetApp FAS2020 I have been told is excellent but at £18k is it over kill for our needs?

The StoreVault S550 will be replicated, 2 SANs for redundancy but another company has told me this solution is not fit for the needs of VMware.

The StorageWorks will be 2 SAN's again for redundancy. If I rememeber right he mentioned it ran on WIndows Storage Server which I am not keen on.

As I am new to the SAN arena I am just looking for some guidance on which solution looks best.

Regards

Craig

[pcomo]

Hi,

I'm working for a system integrator company and generally we offer a solution with Datacore software and HDS array or we fill the Datacore server with HDD to used it as a SAN array.

And if you used two server for Datacore structure, you can use Mirror and Alternate Pathing option.

Have a look at this technologie www.datacore.com, you can used it in iSCSI mode or FC mode and it works perfectly with VMware infrastructure.

[matuscak]

I don't know about how large the Dell/Equallogic presence is in the UK, but I'd suggest you take a look at them as well. Really slick interface, very easy to configure/use, works great with VMware, and at least based on a quick $ to £ conversion, potentially quite a bit less than the NetApp.

[mike_caddy]

I would like to second using DELL Equalogic SANS we have recently and not looked back, The features are enterprise grade and the price is what we can afford.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

I have customers using S550s and they like them but they are using the SAN configuration which the S550 no longer supports. The FAS2020 is a nice NetApp solution for this. Note the S550 is a single controller which could be an issue if you are concerned about controller failures (I am).

I chose the DS3400 for my SMB as it is fast and supports my existing FC infrastructure is fast, has plenty of upgradability. I could easily have gone with the DS4700 as well... It was a price issue.

I would stay away from the HP MSA product line (I have a MSA1000 that barely did the job). I would consider the HP EVA line however.

There is also Xiotech, Compellent, EMC, etc.

It really depends on your needs? If you are interested in Data Deduplication and thin provisioning you are looking at a different class of SANs and iSCSI devices.

It is hard to parse what people mean by SAN these days as iSCSI is often lumped in there as well.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[admin]

Have you considered Lefthand Technologies!

[cw808s]

Thanks for the answers so far.

I have just come back from a VMware demo and HP was present as well. I think the NetApp FAS2020 maybe overkill for us and I quite like the look of the HP offerings. I am still not 100% sure which SAN to get but I think cost may have a heavy influence.

[beckhamk]

our preference is not to run any production on sata drives even in a san. I wouldnt mind equalogic, but their sas solutions for 15/16 drives is around $59k without discount. I would say prod needs to be sas or FC. I would check out HDS their AMS units work great and performance is stellar. one unit with 300gb FC drive will be around $18k US with 3 years of 24/7 support. You might be alright on sata if they plan to keep the vm's and disk io low.

[williambishop]

I second the hitachi as well, I don't know why their sales aren't higher...unless it's the lack of marketing. Their arrays are almost always the fastest out there.

[mike_caddy]

I would second the stay away from HP comment. The MSA line has a bad rep within VMware circles, it didn't offer us the functionality we required until you agmented the product with many extra licenceable features, the EVA line is acceptable but basied on the costs (we recieved when we looked at the product) where significanlty higher than the other vendors.

[mike_caddy]

We run both a Sata and a Sas equalogic shelf, both are acceptably preformant, however our testing sugests that the IO from the SATA chassis is not enough to run heavy VM workloads, Currently we run our low IO VMs in a Pool on the SATA shelf (and store our templates, iso's etc) and high IO VMs on the SAS, this is proving to be quite a good configuration.

iSCSI with the linearly scalable aproach of Equalogic can out preform FC when you scale out to many hosts and large volumes of disks

[bggb29]

The HP eva series is great solution, yes it does get pricey. HP did just buy lefthand recently and they have some nice features.

Netapp will also kill you on every feature ( also does nfs natively) With nfs you are supposed to get good performance as you add more esx hosts to the datastore.

Equalogic is very easy to setup and run, They have good demo's on their site

Compellent allows you to dedupe and tier stroage I believe no addon pricing.

We run eva's and clariions. Although emc is on the way out to complex to manage for a small shop.

[admin]

Again I think if the price is right lefthand is worth a look (SRM sings with this, like a Welsh Pit Voice Choir), Our Vmware dedicated Dude (VAC) thinks its awsome and till last week never heard of them but they have just been bought by major bluechip, its real good but if you want the dogs, NetApp....NFS-iSCSI combo.

[kingsfan01]

I'll toss my hat in the ring for LeftHand as well. I have 2, 2-node clusters (datacenter & DR) and have been very happy with their performance (and price). I need to add some additional nodes but am holding off until I see what HP does with them. I am hoping they don't change their current model because it works VERY well.

Tyler

[cw808s]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the inputs on this. It has given me a lot to think about.

At the moment I am swaying towards a HP solution that was pitched by another company as they seem the most professional.