IBM SAN's

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martyyates

68 posts

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#22175 19-May-2008 14:18

I'm interested in people's experiences with SAN's. We are looking to expand to 10TB from the existing 3.6TB. Looking at an IBM DS3400 among others. Prices / models / future technologies?

Nice one,
Marty.

tonyhughes

Hawkes Bay
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#131788 19-May-2008 15:12

Very happy with IBM SAN deployments I have been involved in (two). They went rather well, despite being oddball ones, and a few drive failures plaguing early testing was the only main issues.

IBM suppport was a little slow, but very good quality.

Talk to DataStor (in my opinion), to get an enthusiastic reseller with IBMs backing, and good hooks into IBM.

insane

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#132884 23-May-2008 20:49

Company I work for chose to use and EMC fiber chanel SAN, have had no regrets but it sure was not cheap. Main use is for a VPS platform. All depends if you want the best or if you are after something affordible.

xpd

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#132943 24-May-2008 08:39

Weve just setup a DS3400 at work.... having a couple of issues but looks like its potentially one HDD thats being a pain. otherwise, its run smoothly so far.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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martyyates

68 posts

Master Geek

#133246 26-May-2008 09:26

good stuff chaps. THe pricing from some of the resellers on the 3400 has been pretty sharp, esp if we go with 1TB SATA's. Appreciate the feedback.

Simonm

181 posts

Master Geek

#133407 26-May-2008 20:50

I cant comment on an IBM SAN, but I have been involved with several EMC SAN deployments. None have had issues out of the box, and from memory only one disk has ever failed.

What are you looking at using this for?

iSCSI/FC ?
VMware ?
Exchange/Databases?
File servers?

Things that are coming that some SANs are starting to support that you might want to take note of:

8Gbps Fibre

10Gbps iSCSI

Mark

1653 posts

Uber Geek

#134151 29-May-2008 13:32

I'm a bit EMC biased but ...

What sort of workload are you going to be putting on the storage array ? If it's anything other than archive or backup to disk then skip SATA drives, they really don't have the performance, especially for Exchange, file and print, VMware, databases, more than 1 attached server :-) etcetc ... good for Tier3 stuff though.

IBM storage is actually pretty good but they are quite no frills. EMC likes the bells and whistles so their kit tends to be very multifunctional (FC, iSCSI, remote replication (synchrnous and asynchronous), snapshots, cloning, LUN migration .. and a large grab bag of software to integrate it applications like Exchange SQL and Oracle etc.

Would you do the implementation yourselves ? Or pay the partner/vendor to do it for you ? If your budget allows you'd be best placed to have the partner or vendor do the design and implementation to your requirements ... better to have someone (aka partner or vendor) else botch it so you can point the finger when it goes wrong and they have to pull out the stops to fix it :-)

Drop me a mail if you want some design work done (my rates are very reasonable :-), being doing SAN stuff for 12 years now .. kind of got the hang of it ;-)

Mark

SilentOne

290 posts

Ultimate Geek

#134160 29-May-2008 14:14

HP's EVA4400 are pretty sharp - worth a glance.