said by cmaenginsb :

Hi, any suggestions for an economical SAN that supports 400 Tb controller. Maybe something outside the usual suspects?

said by cmaenginsb :

Nexsan for example can do an array of this size but it's SATA and SAS, which doesn't meet the requirements.

said by cmaenginsb :

I'm wondering if there are any other companies doing arrays of this size that support both SATA and FC drives?

said by jester121 :

What does meet the requirements without using SATA or SAS?

said by Jahntassa :

FC drives? FC as in Fibre Channel?

I wasn't aware they were making drives with Fibre connectors built in!

In all seriousness, I think more insight into what you're trying to accomplish would be helpful. I haven't done anything with arrays this size but I would imagine a single controller that supports SATA -and- FC sources doesn't really exist, unless you're considering a 'SAN appliance' as a controller.

said by cmaenginsb :

Drives with FC connectors have been available since at least 2006 maybe earlier, here's a link to some of Seagate's »www.seagate.com/www/en-us/produc···h_15k.7/

said by nixen :

The intrinsic problem of arrays implementing internal FC is the requirement to implement internal FC networks (either the more common internal loops or the rarer switched-fabric designs). A lot of the not "usual suspects" are in the market because of price considerations of the "usual suspects". Internal FC networks, particularly of the highly redundant, high-speed switched-fabric designs you'll find in an HDS enterprise-class frame, don't generally fit with the "price considerations" model. It's even rarer to find arrays with internal FC and NAS-only data presentation (the NAS protocols typically become a bottleneck that obviates the reason for having internal FC).

I can't remember what 3par runs internally. But they'd be the one I'd check after EMC/HDS/NetApp. Pure performance and scalability standpoint, I might look at DataDirect.

said by Jahntassa :

Learn something new every day.. I had no idea they made internal drives with FC connections, but then our company is much too small to be dabbling in FC in the first place.

said by cmaenginsb :

Thanks, I had just started looking at 3par and I'll check DataDirect.
We do video surveillance which really only needs a lot of storage for archival purposes so speed isn't an issue for us but occasionally we get a customer (usually government) that has a bigger pocketbook to put in some requirements for FC and large controller sizes etc. In that case I usually go with Hitachi and in a few cases EMC but I wanted to see if there were any newer players that would be more cost competitive because in those contracts cost is a factor.

said by nixen :

For surveilance video, you *really* don't need FC-class storage. Well-designed SAS, or even SATA, storage will tend to be sufficient.

Solutions from Isilon and Nexsan would be more than sufficient and provide a lot of resiliency and at an attractive price point.

If you wanted to go with a big name on their low/mid-tier products, the EMC CLARiiONs, you mentioned previously, and the HDS AMS systems would probably do you well.

3par is mostly geared towards mixed-use, utility computing (the predecessor to the current "cloud computing" model and that Sun called, at one point, "grid computing").

Speaking of Sun, you might look at their Thumper storage servers.

Can't remember whether BlueArc is still out there, but they've been playing at the surveillance segment of the video storage space, too.

said by cmaenginsb :

I understand that FC is way overkill, it's the customer that is specifying FC drives. Regretfully the customer wants FC to the servers as well and Thumper is only NAS and possibly iSCSI from what I remember.

said by nixen :

Sadly, customers often want the wrong things. Best we can do is try to talk them down from the cliff.

The one thing that should weigh into your recommendations is scalability. Sure, your customer wants 400TB now - that's actually become a "small" configuration - but, how fast will their data grow? Most of the solutions from the non "usual suspects" top out at around 1 or 2PB.

Could be worse: could be asking you about solutions that include SSD. I was on a DoD project, earlier this year, where along with "what can we do to virtualize our storage" (they were already running EMC and NetApp arrays), they also asked whether they should go SSD (for, essentially, static content like SharePoint and home directories).

said by cmaenginsb :

Yeah, if it wasn't an RFP response I'd spend a lot of time lobbying for a different way. The video will only need about 30 Tb and isn't likely to change much, the extra capacity and FC requirement is because they want to share the array for some basic IT needs. With currently supported drives/densities they won't be able to get much more than 400 Tb because they don't have room for additional cabinets.

said by nixen :

Could be worse: could be asking you about solutions that include SSD. I was on a DoD project, earlier this year, where along with "what can we do to virtualize our storage" (they were already running EMC and NetApp arrays), they also asked whether they should go SSD (for, essentially, static content like SharePoint and home directories).

said by Simba7 :

Sometimes I just wish the DoD would actually talk to their own IT personnel.

said by Simba7 :

Being in the Navy for 8 years, it's amazing that no one wanted questions about how to build out the NMCI network. It just gets irritating when you have thousands of IT personnel and never ask them how to build their new network.