Well said, Martin Before you make the final decision, be sure to get a 45-day pilot test so you can work out all the nuances that will impact your environment.
-*ASB*: http://XeeSM.com/AndrewBaker <http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker> Providing Competitive Advantage through Effective IT Leadership On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Martin Blackstone <[email protected]>wrote: > I would also jump in here and comment that while you say your needs are > simple, they may not be in the future. > > Additionally you will want to take a look at the software offerings of each > vendor. > > I work for a storage vendor myself and I’m not going to pitch you on one, > but here is what I will tell you. > > If you just want a bunch of disk that is redundant, ANYONE will sell you > that and you can buy it mega cheap. Open the back pages of PCWorld and you > will find a dozen of them waiting for your call. > > But if you actually want this stuff to work for YOU and ultimately save > you time, money, and your data, you need to look at what types of > applications these vendors are going to include. What do you use to > provision LUNS? How do you do snapshots, backups, replication, manage data > like Exchange or SQL, etc? Can they do native deduplication of data? All of > this stuff is important and while you may not realize it now, you should. > You go buy a big box of disk and you are going to find yourself hitting a > brick wall at some point down the way. > > Understand how each vendor does snapshots and what kind of storage and > performance impact it is going to have on your storage device. > > > > *From:* Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]] > *Sent:* Friday, October 09, 2009 8:37 AM > *To:* NT System Admin Issues > *Subject:* Re: NAS/SAN > > > > The transition from DAS to network storage requires a bit more planning. > Left unsaid in your email is if you're also virtualizing your servers. You > haven't quantified you're actually using now. IF you want 5 TB and you're > using 3 TB now, 5 may not be sufficient. I would also suggest that you need > to factor spindle count into your matrix. You don't want' just gobs of > storage, you want to maintain throughput as well. Then, given the risks of > recovering from a hard disk failure you should also carefully consider the > RAID implementations (and disk size) allowed for each type of device. > > > > I ended up selecting an EqualLogic unit at 2 TB (8x250GB disks). The > performance has been great, but I underestimated how much storage I would > actually end up needing. I'm buying another 2 TB next year. Once you have > the capability of doing snapshots and you fully virtualize your > infrastructure your network storage needs rise dramatically. > > > > -Jonathan > > On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:06 AM, John Aldrich < > [email protected]> wrote: > > So, we’re working on getting our first big “storage appliance” here. As the > IT Manager it’s my job to get quotes, etc. I’m talking to all the “big boys” > out there and getting a lot of good quotes. My requirements are fairly > simple: > > 1) On the order of 5 Terabytes of storage (*significantly* more than > we are using currently.) > > 2) Redundant everything (disks, controllers, network, power, etc.) > > > > That’s about it. We are looking, eventually, to bring email in-house, > probably using Kerio mail server as it’s got the features we need at a price > we can live with. The problem is that I’m getting quotes all over the place. > The last quote I got was for a QNap ISCSI NAS with 6 1 Tb drives, but it > doesn’t have the redundancy I’m looking for (no redundant controllers.) > > > > I’ve gotten quotes from vendors for HP, LSI, NetApp, QNap and am working on > an Equallogic quote. Anyone else I should be looking at? Our plan is to get > two of these for DR/Business Continuity purposes and have one of them at a > remote office, and possibly even back the remote one up to tape. J > > > > Am I being too paranoid? Not enough? Anything else I should be looking at? > At first I was really wanting single-instance storage, but the LSI vendor > kind of talked me out of that being a requirement. I get a report every > night from the current storage detailing all duplicate files, and there > aren’t that many so I think I can get away with not having > de-duplication/single-instance storage. > > > > Your thoughts, please? > > [image: John-Aldrich][image: Tile-Tools] > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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