SAN .. which one would you buy?

xbmc · 14-01-2009 7:54pm #1

What are peoples experiences with mid tier SANs, with regard to ease of configuration, stability and features. ?

If you had to buy one tomorrow .. starting off with say 4TB (expanding to 16TB in the mid term future) and serving 10 servers .. which make and model of SAN would you choose?

qwertz · 15-01-2009 1:08am

Adding a budget would help a lot in making the decision

Mena · 15-01-2009 11:36am

I've a lot of experience with the HP SAN's, the MSA products in particular. We used the MSA 1000 originally, think it's been bumped to the MSA 2000 series now. 1 to 48 disks if I recall, total capacity of 48Tb.

They were always pretty simple to use/manage.

Higher spec requirements you can look at the EVA series as well. I've seen product demos of most of the other manufacturers but overall still prefer the HP range (biased based on experience though).

We initially had 4 servers connected to the MSA 1000 but upscaled to 10 later on and it was fine (hot as hell though).

I can't recall the costs exactly but if I am not mistaken we got away with around 40k for a new one last year, not a replacement, just a different department. Initial capacity was around 10Tb I think (brain fade).

I'm sure you could get far better value today however.

Standard Toaster · 16-01-2009 1:57am

We're actually upgrading this weekend. Going from an MSA1000 to IMB N3600. Existing MSL6000 for backup. Mix of Fibre & Sata drives. The TB going into it escapes me now.

We'll be using ours for the file cluster & proabably vmware (vmotion) down the road. Exchange DB will likey be fired on there too. Same setup recipicated to DR in realtime.