The 4300 '4.8 TB' solution will give you 1.83 USABLE TB of storage space. This is based on RAID 5 solution. Remember if you buy a 4300 4.8 TB SAS an you actually get 2 node so if you use 2-way mirroring which will give you the 1 node failour use get 1.83TB. 1.83 TB comes from 2-way mirroring plus RAID 5 loss. However LeftHand is very modular and VERY easy to manage and very modular. The more nodes you add the more performance you get. I think it's good for VMware solutions.
The IOps you'd expect for BAU (both nodes online) is about 2200 IOps. If one node fails then half the IOps..
LeftHand is a good solution, you get all the features like Thin Prov, Snapshots, and async replication (SRM supported).
4 x 1GBs Nics is a lot, and shouldnt be your bottleneck. If anything make sure your network infrastructure will support it and if need be buy 2 Gbs switches that support flow control. Congested networks tend to be the main bottleneck. iSCSI should at the least be on their own VLAN for security and performace. Read the iSCSI SAN guide from vmware, its pretty good!
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Peter Grant
Virtualization Consultant
Xtravirt.com
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