OS and Software > No, I Will Not Fix Your #@$!! Computer > New SAN

New SAN

Anything but HPs EVA and MSA series SANs. The EVA is stagnant, and the MSAs are plagued by HPs horrible horrible horrible firmware.

I'm a big fan of the new EMC VNX series, but the 2 compellent's I've had to work on seemed pretty slick too.

the compellent's are pretty slick from what i've seen. i really like the management of the compellent's and it seems like they would be a good option long term
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Think Ahead. Learn More. Solve Now!

What size of SAN are you in the market for?

we need about 20 TB's

reply to Modus
We use both netapps and equallogic. The current netapps for about 4 years old and we had one before that. Never had a problem with either of them. I have had the equallogic about a year or two. I had a drive go out friday before new years weekend at about 3 in the afternoon. We had a new drive 2 hours later. That is the only problem we have had with that one.
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don't get 2 close 2 my fantasy

reply to Modus
We are pretty happy with HP's EVA. Just added more drives to get a total of 12TB and have not had any issues other than 2 drives fail and this one time we lost power for hours and the array was ungracefully shutdown and all cache memory batteries were depleted. (bad thing)

Other than that it has been working great since 2007.

reply to boognish

I'm sort of surprised not to see more mentions about compellent...i'm not liking the emc theses days after seeing how other vendors scale and i really dont like how they bolt on new code in their ancient firmware to keep it young. Anyway...
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Think Ahead. Learn More. Solve Now!

reply to Modus
I had the rep come in to do a demo last year on an Equalogic SAN, some really nice features, they was doing a cool trick in which he pulled half the drives out, and it was still serving up the video that was on the drive.

That said, they were outrageously expensive, something like 70K (after hefty negotiation) for 15TB, I just needed raw storage and ended up buying a couple of SAS based Infortrend DAS's for about 15 or 16K and built a wannabe NAS out of the deal.
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No, I didn't. Honest... I ran out of gas. I... I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake.......

reply to Modus
Im planning out a huge new SAN here, anyone have experience going over 180 TB ?

Im laughing at the need for 180 + TB. But Business is kicking and I am going to need 500 TB by the end of the year !

Any one have any experience going this big yet ? Or even over 64 TB ? That has been my biggest build yet.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

We manage almost 2 petabyte in our global SAN environment. The only arrays that I would want to put that much data in is Tier 1 storage like a EMC Symmetirx, Hitachi VSP, or a HP P9500(which is really a rebranded VSP)
If you are looking at 180TB+ then you are talking some serious money, as in several million dollars.

reply to Modus
Managing an Equallogic PS6500E (24TB) for vSphere backend. Bought in 2009 and hasn't skipped a beat. Firmware updates are seamless and like others have said, you don't pay for additional features. I would say though it depends on your need for scalability. We also looked at Netapp & EMC which were excellent units, but didn't compare on cost/performance/features.

I will look heavily at Equallogic again when the time comes to upgrade/replace this unit.

reply to BosstonesOwn
Is this for online, heavily accessed date like SQL/Exchange/VM? Or will it be for little used archive data? If it's archive related you could save some money by opting for enterprise grade SATA or 7.2K SAS drives instead of using 10K or 15K SAS drives everywhere.

Considering the amount of drive heads available if you had 180-500 1TB drives, even SATA or 7.2K SAS drives could perform reasonably well. Of course the higher RPM SAS drives will still blow them out of the water as high queue depths and probably at low queue depths too.

This is going to take up a LOT of space too. Could save some space and possibly even get a little more performance out of it too by going for 2.5" drives. Of course you could always do like Backblaze did with their storage pod. Of course with the recent jump in HDD prices I doubt you can build theirs as cheaply anymore. For that matter HDD prices are going to affect whatever route you take.

It is for database access. Im looking at the symmetrix line now, was just quoted 6M. For all the stuff I would need and the redundancy they requested.

And now I think I also need to find the space cooling and power for it.
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"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

reply to Modus
We just bought two nimble sans, these things are nice and the compression is unbelivable on them.

reply to Modus
We use EqualLogic, have PS5500 and PS6000 series units. Nice stuff. Not that I've tried it, but the arrays are also suppose to be smart enough that if you swap two drives into different slots, it'll work. Ours have been reliable, aside from the occasional drive failure, but Dell always emails me within an hour or so to confirm where to ship the replacement.

reply to elwoodblues