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RaglanDan
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EVA 4400

Our partner is recomending an HP EVA 4400 as an upgrade from our MSA 1000. We are a completely HP shop so this makes sense in that regard. My question is what else should we be looking at? What else is there in this price range. Is there anything better out there for the money? We will be putting about 5Tb of disk in it.

Any ideas appreciated.

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bobross
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Advice: first, look beyond price (of acquisition). Your organization will probably be much better served by looking at total cost of operation, over at least five years. After all, the minute after you buy it, you own it and have to operate and maintain it. That's where the big expense is. As for vendors, your partner is doing you no favors by keeping you in the single-vendor cave. Come out of the cave and look around. There are many, many good offerings in that space, and a few really great offerings, with features and functions that will save you time and money over the long haul. But, the very best offerings around have a 5-year warranty; that's really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Look for those.

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bobross
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Advice: first, look beyond price (of acquisition). Your organization will probably be much better served by looking at total cost of operation, over at least five years. After all, the minute after you buy it, you own it and have to operate and maintain it. That's where the big expense is. As for vendors, your partner is doing you no favors by keeping you in the single-vendor cave. Come out of the cave and look around. There are many, many good offerings in that space, and a few really great offerings, with features and functions that will save you time and money over the long haul. But, the very best offerings around have a 5-year warranty; that's really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Look for those.

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aremmes
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We have an MSA1500cs with a single controller and a single MSA30 disk shelf. When we researched what it'd cost us to upgrade it to dual controllers, a second disk shelf, new disks, and so on to bring it to a tolerable state, it turned out to be more expensive than an EVA4400 starter kit. That, and the problems people have reported with the MSA1500cs, the apparent rather poor quality of the MSA2000 series, and the unconvincing specs of just about everything else in its range led us to the EVA.

RaglanDan
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Thanks for the advice - can you reccomend any different models in particular that we should be looking at? Obviously budget will be a big limiting factor here as we are only a small company.

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bobross
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My company is also small. As for models, I try to keep abreast of several in the marketplace, because of the rapid pace of development. As such, without bias, I'd look at Xiotech, NetApp, Equallogic to name three. All three of those companies have small-sized systems that work quite well in VMware environments; I have tested them all, they are all different of course and have different strengths. Xiotech for SAN, NetApp for NAS, Equallogic for iSCSI. In small shops like yours and mine, I have learned to be open to but somewhat wary of the traditional vendors, and broaden out the search for excellence.