SANs - where are people spending their budget?

[Spammeh]

Hi All,

Just wondering where people are spending their budgets SAN wise at the moment. We're due a refresh on our old HP LeftHand P4500 3.6TB nodes and are looking around at various vendors such as NetApp, EMC, Dell, etc.

Any change in vendor will mean a gradual change over as we have 5 HP Lefthand nodes in total but we will replace these gradually as the maintenance expires.

If we were sticking to HP then we'd probably go for a 14.4TB option, a couple of those in a new cluster probably, but for me, the lack of dedupe etc makes me want to go elsewhere.

I noticed the NetApp offerings use SATA disks as opposed to SAS disks - seems a bit bizarre to me! Just wondering your opinions on it - whose worth looking at, and who aren't worth the time?

 

[Spammeh]

174 views and nobody inputting?

 

[Teledude]

Depends..

Whats your usage? File/Virtualization/VDI/Mail/Mixed etc? IOPS profile? Backup? Replication?

The trend is moving away from SATA/SAS and more towards SSD and MLC in the enterprise space but judging by the size of your current ones they might come way over budget!

The NetApp software is one of the better ones out their and its ability to use multiple protocols etc is a good driver - never buy SATA though unless its a pure CIFS filer / archive

 

[AlexD]

As has already been pointed out it's a very open ended question and depends greatly on your requirements, from many points of view .... capacity/performance/connectivity/management/etc....

Right now I'm in the process of comparing arrays from EMC (VNX) and DELL (compellent) for a DR site. Dell definitely has the edge from the management tools POV and has some great performance without needing any flash based caching.

But this is very specific to my requirements and might not be what you're looking for...

 

[morfmedia]

EMC ftw but keep saving. You should be able to get 70% discount or so. Try and buy at end of quarter / year for biggest discounts.

 

[Vanilla]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/10/idc_storage_tracker_q2_2012/

 

[Vanilla]

Also, check out Nimble, i'm hearing very good things about them.

 

[bods]

EMC ftw but keep saving. You should be able to get 70% discount or so. Try and buy at end of quarter / year for biggest discounts.

Agreed. We got significant savings at end of year. We would not get anything like those discounts normally and we've been running EMC for over 5 years - we've just migrated over to our second SAN.

 

[Spammeh]

Its used for our live environment, so no backups etc will be on it. Ideally it will have good performance, but things like dedupe are a must for us really. Management as easy as left hand would be good.

Looks like EMC are worth looking at. Has anyone used this nimble?

We're probably looking for 2 nodes (for network raid - assuming most do this?) and costs below £25k inc support. Are we priced out of the decent end of the EMC / Netapp products then?

 

[AlexD]

Its used for our live environment, so no backups etc will be on it. Ideally it will have good performance, but things like dedupe are a must for us really. Management as easy as left hand would be good.

Looks like EMC are worth looking at. Has anyone used this nimble?

We're probably looking for 2 nodes (for network raid - assuming most do this?) and costs below £25k inc support. Are we priced out of the decent end of the EMC / Netapp products then?

I seriously think you should look at the dell compellent line of products, I've always been more of an EMC fan but you can't ignore a good product. They have de-dupe, very granular storage tiering from 512KB blocks (blows EMC out of the water in this respect..1GB chunks seriously!?) and their management is dead easy to use and gives you a lot of functionality without having to buy all the additional licenses like you do with EMC.

Network raid is a left hand "technology" but for 25K budget any solution will provide redundant controllers with options in the future to use LUN volume replication and things like that if you wish to have any additional redundancy.

 

[kefkef]

I've got all the numbers for the disti pricing for the low end NetApp stuff, will post it when I fire up my laptop on Saturday, if you go down the netapp route it will give you an idea on the markup being put on it and your negotiation powers (bearing in mind the reseller does need to make a small profit to keep in business!) haha

 

[danielanthony]

I seriously think you should look at the dell compellent line of products, I've always been more of an EMC fan but you can't ignore a good product. They have de-dupe, very granular storage tiering from 512KB blocks (blows EMC out of the water in this respect..1GB chunks seriously!?) and their management is dead easy to use and gives you a lot of functionality without having to buy all the additional licenses like you do with EMC.

Network raid is a left hand "technology" but for 25K budget any solution will provide redundant controllers with options in the future to use LUN volume replication and things like that if you wish to have any additional redundancy.

I doubt you'll get a Compellent for that kind of budget. You'll be looking at the EqualLogic PS4000 series.

 

[AlexD]

I doubt you'll get a Compellent for that kind of budget. You'll be looking at the EqualLogic PS4000 series.

Trust me if they are going up against EMC (especially) you will definitely get a system within that budget I've had a cheaper price for the compellent up against a base vnx 5300 which is still under the 25k

 

[Vanilla]

I seriously think you should look at the dell compellent line of products, I've always been more of an EMC fan but you can't ignore a good product. They have de-dupe, very granular storage tiering from 512KB blocks (blows EMC out of the water in this respect..1GB chunks seriously!?) and their management is dead easy to use and gives you a lot of functionality without having to buy all the additional licenses like you do with EMC.

I agree on looking at Dell. I think Equalogic could be a good option based on price. However...

.....Compellent vs EMC VNX. You have to remember that both systems are a dual head architecture with limited CPU. The more granular the chunks the more data tracking and movement. 1GB is a good solid amount which wont involve to much moving.

Then there is the time to move. EMC prefers to do it overnight, every night. Compellent needs 12 days to demote data and 4 days to promote it. Compellent may have smaller chunks but it chooses to move them a lot slower to reduce the overheads.

Secondly, a BIG down side with compellent is they have only just moved to 64 bit and their hardware is still lagging behind. That means it has 4GB of System ram when the VNX can have up to 2TB with fancy FAST Cache. 4GB was so 2004.

Additionally the VNX gives you iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and object as well as FC. Compellent can get you NAS but it has to be a bolt on and it's managed via a different GUI......

There are only 5 licenses with EMC and a sixth which is 'buy everything'. So it's not as if you're going to have a situation where you need a license for every little feature.

 

[FirebarUK]

Avoid EMC, imo.

Not what you want but these guys: http://www.purestorage.com/ - simply because their video is great

 

[morfmedia]

To get the best pricing you have to play them all off against each other, especially Netapp / EMC. As above a VNX sounds like a good fit for what you require.

Firebar: Why avoid EMC, I think their products and support are awesome, expensive but you know it'll be reliable and they won't go bankrupt etc. Once you've had stretched clusters over 30KM apart you'll like EMC hardware, they just work.

Nimble are getting rave reviews but they are still a small / niche player at the moment.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

NetApps are brilliant.

 

[FirebarUK]

To get the best pricing you have to play them all off against each other, especially Netapp / EMC. As above a VNX sounds like a good fit for what you require.

Firebar: Why avoid EMC, I think their products and support are awesome, expensive but you know it'll be reliable and they won't go bankrupt etc. Once you've had stretched clusters over 30KM apart you'll like EMC hardware, they just work.

Nimble are getting rave reviews but they are still a small / niche player at the moment.

I think NetApp are better, unified ONTAP OS across the range is great. My experience of EMC so far boils down to crappy firmware upgrades with poor support together with fragmented products.

NetApps are brilliant.

This. I also like HP stuff (LeftHand and 3PAR).

 

[.:MBK:.]

NetApp's big plus point is the brilliance of the software suite, along with the uniform functionality across the range. The vendor's downfall is the quality of some of the sales staff from my day to day dealings with them, but that's more of a distribution/reseller headache than an end user one.

 

[richard smith]

Another vote for EMC from me. I have CX3, CX4 and now VNX SANS.

The VNX is a lovely bit of kit and simplicity itself to manage.

I cant understand how you could complain about support. I have found EMC support to be awesome to the point of being woken up by them in the middle of the night as a disk had failed. Engineers were always onsite promptly to swap out any failed disks. And that's all I've ever had go wrong. It just works.