20tb of SAN Storage?
Discussion
swerni said:
You can also do 255 snapshots per volume with no impact to performance and
no space till you change data. Try that with an EVA
I think an EVA is looking unlikely tbh, haven't quite worked out where it's pitched but it does seem a little feature-light.no space till you change data. Try that with an EVA
Very interested in Lefthand, I'm taken with the concept of the clustering and the multi-site and being able to assign "importance" to LUNs via Network RAID.
I may still look into NetApp, but my gut reaction is still that I prefer one vendor for everything.
Welcome to the cash hornets nest - be prepared to have you budget pillaged by charlatans & fly-by-night sales monkeys! 
At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
tvrforever said:
Welcome to the cash hornets nest - be prepared to have you budget pillaged by charlatans & fly-by-night sales monkeys!
At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
Pretty spot on here. basically you could question the whole chain ie vmware, the storage vendors and even the make of server. to answer another point, yes we are independent, but like most tech companies we have partnerships.At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
tvrforever said:
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
I'm open to suggestions so feel free?One of the drivers for looking at the LeftHand solution is simple that it isn't mega expensive, seems growable, and come with any/all licenses so none of this arse-raping a year down the line when you decide you want to replicate or take exchange snapshots and so on.
do you use vmotion? or any feature of DRS or HA? If the answer is yes, then das is not exactly going to help you.
There are ways to fudge this. On the storage side left hand is an interesting story, as it netapps, and a bunch of others Compellent, pillar or even some of the intel boxes ( http://www.open-e.com/products) anything is possible. But we probably would all need more data to design it for you ie workload, number of systems, number of esx boxes, network, power and cooling capability, what iops you think you need, what you currently have etc. Perhaps its worth an engagement!
There are ways to fudge this. On the storage side left hand is an interesting story, as it netapps, and a bunch of others Compellent, pillar or even some of the intel boxes ( http://www.open-e.com/products) anything is possible. But we probably would all need more data to design it for you ie workload, number of systems, number of esx boxes, network, power and cooling capability, what iops you think you need, what you currently have etc. Perhaps its worth an engagement!
Edited by maddog-uk on Monday 19th July 23:28
paddyhasneeds said:
The de-dupe is of interest, but is there any way other than "finger in the air" to even start to estimate how much real world saving there might be?
For example VM's sure it makes sense that you boot VMDKs are nearly all identical so there's savings to be made, but beyond that?
Can depend on the cost of the de-dupe licence. A year ago the cost of the licence (HP EVA) matched the cost of disk *likely* to be saved, so was of zero value to me YMMVFor example VM's sure it makes sense that you boot VMDKs are nearly all identical so there's savings to be made, but beyond that?
swerni said:
maddog-uk said:
Feel free to drop me an email as well. Work for an independent tech company who operate in the virtual space and specialise in this stuff and a bunch of other things.
Independent, I've never met one of those 
thats me 
i don't sell product and thats about as independant as anyone can get in this space.tvrforever said:
Welcome to the cash hornets nest - be prepared to have you budget pillaged by charlatans & fly-by-night sales monkeys!
At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
So what you're saying is that if you can't afford to spend a few million quid, you don't *really* need a SAN?At 20-25TB of SAN you're right at the entry level sizing for any kit, thus the decent stuff will be vastly out of your budget - tricky size to get anything of quality (tech, service, support, price etc).
EMC - expensive with vast variety (ie too many) products, will forefully state lots but with little evidence
HP - EVA=junk utter junk, XP=HDS rebadged
HDS - AMS range should suit you, but software/company can be hard to engage
Oracle - nothing happening
NetApp - expensive but some decent features (2xxx or 3xxx range would suit)
IBM - SVC is ok, XIV = dead, DSxxxx = old and they forget they sell storage most times
Dell - oh purlease, have you tried their laptops?
Frankly a question I'd ask is why do you need SAN for such a small capacity? VMWare works great on NFS/iSCSI and you'd be more in the sweetspot of those products without the cost overheads. Or heck, if you're comfortable with capacity planning forecasts then why not DAS with SAS shelves? (given VMware backup/recovery is an utter pig anyway)
Oh and don't even get into the storage & SAN management software space unless you have a 7-8 digit budget!
<yes I buy storage in the PBs per year - yes it's a criminal industry>
Which magic 'not listed above' vendor do you from PBs worth from if they all sell rubbish?
maddog-uk said:
do you use vmotion? or any feature of DRS or HA? If the answer is yes, then das is not exactly going to help you.
There are ways to fudge this. On the storage side left hand is an interesting story, as it netapps, and a bunch of others Compellent, pillar or even some of the intel boxes ( http://www.open-e.com/products) anything is possible. But we probably would all need more data to design it for you ie workload, number of systems, number of esx boxes, network, power and cooling capability, what iops you think you need, what you currently have etc. Perhaps its worth an engagement!
We use ESX HA and I'd like to look at upgrading us to vmotion, so shared storage is a must have (and is what we have now).There are ways to fudge this. On the storage side left hand is an interesting story, as it netapps, and a bunch of others Compellent, pillar or even some of the intel boxes ( http://www.open-e.com/products) anything is possible. But we probably would all need more data to design it for you ie workload, number of systems, number of esx boxes, network, power and cooling capability, what iops you think you need, what you currently have etc. Perhaps its worth an engagement!
Edited by maddog-uk on Monday 19th July 23:28
I did speak to Compellent and Pillar but at our level I walked away not entirely convinced there'd be any significant benefit over <insert cheaper product here>.
Workload is pretty simple, around 30 VM's, couple of DC's, Exchange server, file server, and SQL server and beyond those you're left with mostly commodity servers such as a dedicated VM for antivirus and so on.
Right now we have 2 single Quad Core ESX hosts each with 24gb of RAM, when they get replaced I'll be going for dual physical socket boxes with "lots" more RAM so I don't envisage needing more than 2 hosts.
Network is ProCurve at the core, if I go iSCSI I'd be dropping in dedicated switches for the host to storage network.
IOPS, our peak load is during our backup window and when I last measured average is around 1100 with a peak of a couple of thousand.
We're a physically large site and our immediate DR room is a couple of miles away on the end of a 10gbps fibre link, so in time I'd be looking at getting some form of replication going between locations and I'd like this to be at the storage level rather than a fudge of robocopy's and client based replication and so on.
I should stress that whilst we don't have money to burn, I'm not looking to do this on the cheap. Our AX4 has served us very well.
Just by way of a follow-up, I have HP and a reseller sorting out ballpark special bid pricing on a P4000 solution, and I also have NetApp coming in to see me with a reseller in a week or so.
I'd be interested in any info on NetApp from fellow PH'ers, obviously there's a fair bit out there on the blogs and on the vmware forums but it all counts.
From what I can see so far, from the Netapp range I suspect a FAS2040 is about the right placement.
I'd be interested in any info on NetApp from fellow PH'ers, obviously there's a fair bit out there on the blogs and on the vmware forums but it all counts.
From what I can see so far, from the Netapp range I suspect a FAS2040 is about the right placement.
Right then. Lefthand, Equallogic and EMC approximate pricing are in, still waiting on Netapp.
As it stands I suspect it's going to be difficult to do two sites (live and backup) in one hit, pricing suggests we will be able to justify one really good array or two lesser featured arrays.
Any other vendors/solutions that people would suggest I look into?
Interestingly I've been taking some performance metrics and our IOPS profile is pretty low, the issue is the volume of storage either needs a lot of SAS spindles (expensive) or relatively few SATA spindles (lower IO).
As it stands I suspect it's going to be difficult to do two sites (live and backup) in one hit, pricing suggests we will be able to justify one really good array or two lesser featured arrays.
Any other vendors/solutions that people would suggest I look into?
Interestingly I've been taking some performance metrics and our IOPS profile is pretty low, the issue is the volume of storage either needs a lot of SAS spindles (expensive) or relatively few SATA spindles (lower IO).
paddyhasneeds said:
Right then. Lefthand, Equallogic and EMC approximate pricing are in, still waiting on Netapp.
As it stands I suspect it's going to be difficult to do two sites (live and backup) in one hit, pricing suggests we will be able to justify one really good array or two lesser featured arrays.
Any other vendors/solutions that people would suggest I look into?
Interestingly I've been taking some performance metrics and our IOPS profile is pretty low, the issue is the volume of storage either needs a lot of SAS spindles (expensive) or relatively few SATA spindles (lower IO).
You should reconsider Compellent, if your iops are low vs the amount of usable capacity you require. If you have any growth requirements in future years, they will save you a fortune vs the other players. PM me if you need further info.As it stands I suspect it's going to be difficult to do two sites (live and backup) in one hit, pricing suggests we will be able to justify one really good array or two lesser featured arrays.
Any other vendors/solutions that people would suggest I look into?
Interestingly I've been taking some performance metrics and our IOPS profile is pretty low, the issue is the volume of storage either needs a lot of SAS spindles (expensive) or relatively few SATA spindles (lower IO).
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