Well the storage search continues. Some vendors have been eliminated, and some have been added. I am down to two potential SAN vendors and hope to have the choice made by the end of March. Both are IP SAN’s, and both are provide good solutions. Here are the two companies that are in the running:
Monday, March 07, 2005
SAN Search Narrowed
7 comments:
For a smaller SAN installation, you might be interested in the new Dell AX100i iSCSI device. Comes as either Fiber Channel or Gigabit Ethernet and single or dual processor. SATA drives for cost effective expansion. Looks pretty interesting.
Great Idea! I actually looked at that as well. We are not starting too small, we are jumping in at 20TB. Because of the complexity of FiberChannel I am trying to stay with iSCSI.
I just went through the same process and narrowed things down to the same two vendors. It was truly a toss up. I ultimately chose the EqualLogic PS200E array for a couple of reasons: (1) complete, 100% redundancy in each box - two controllers, two power supplies, etc. I like that level of protection better than the LeftHand "more units = protection" method. (2) cost: I was able to get a PS200E for less than $9K per TB whereas the LeftHand unit was about $11K per TB. (3) Performance: this was one area that I had the hardest time with. EqualLogic posts insanely high performance numbers whereas LeftHand's are insanely low (they were telling me about 600 iops per device, or 1800 iops for 3 devices). EqualLogic was telling me something like 30,000 iops, but I suspect that this was as data was read out of cache and not from the disks. That said, the EqualLogic "marketing" helped to push me over the edge. (4) Case studies: I talked to other customers on both sides - I got a more enthusiatic reception from the EqualLogic customers that were very happy with the unit.
Our PS200E has been in for 2 weeks and I must say I'm impressed so far. The installation took - literally - 15 minutes, and it seems pretty solid and is performing well in our environment.
One more thing...
Since you're looking at higher capacities, look at the new PS800E from EqualLogic... it's an addition to their line.
Scott thanks so much for the feedback. I came down to these last two and it was a toss up. They are both very comparible solutions with minor differences. It is probably going to come down to cost as well, and at this point I have gotten the LeftHand solution at under $8000 a TB so Im leaning that way, but we will see.
Scott, one more thing :)
How big of a soluion did you start with and what data primarily are going to be storing there? Maybe you could shoot me an email and we could chat offline. I would love to hear what you are doing.
Terry,
As for what we started with, we got the EqualLogic PS200E with 5.6TB raw capacity and 3.5 usable out of the box. We do RAID-10 (or whatever they call it - it's two RAID 5 arrays with 2 hot spares - spread across fourteen 400GB SATA drives. The cool part: When we add our next PS200E, it'll join our existing cluster and extend the RAID arrays across both units.
Each unit has two controllers, each with 3 network adapters. 3 are always hot and 3 are always spare. We have two switches between the PS200E and our servers and multihome the iSCSI connections for further fault tolerance.
We're going to be storing Exchange stores, SQL Server databases and files on the array. The snapshotting capability is huge for us.
Feel free to email me when you get a chance. I'm slowe (@) elmira dot edu.
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