I've managed the EMC FC series, CX series, and the IBM DS4000 series.
Over the last couple years, we eventually moved everything off of EMC
and onto IBM DS4300 Turbos, which I really like and enjoy working with.
One of the considerations you might want to look at is making sure you
can use both FC and SATA disks in the same array, that way you can have
your dbs running on high speed (high cost) "primary" storage and your
F&P on lower speed (cheap cost) "secondary" storage. From what I've
seen so far:
EMC purchased through Dell - Dell has a contract with EMC to only allow
you to have Dell support the DELL | EMC branded equipment. Even though
it's been stable and relatively easy to manage, the licensing and way
Dell handles things I really don't like. For instance, if you purchase
a DELL|EMC SAN from Dell, they will only sell it to you with
professional services (them installing it for you), and they wanted
another ~$30-35K for that. You can get around it by purchasing the
system as a DAS first, then adding switches later. Dell's advanced
systems support is horrible also. I've had their highest level
engineers say really dumb things like "What is iSCSI?" and "I know you
are running linux, but I need you to right click on My Computer..."
EMC purchased separately - Support much better, but I still didn't like
the Navisphere tiered licensing, and the agent / powerpath licensing
costs. EMC support is much better than Dell's support of the same
products, but I haven't had to call for anything really hard to figure
out. (usually just failed drive replacements)
IBM - The DS4300s have been really stable, really easy to manage, and
the IBM tech support is very knowledgeable. There are two support
options, one is hardware only and the other includes applications also
(such as RDAC). This is truthfully the only system I'll do live system
upgrades of the SAN switches and controllers during production hours
without worrying about bringing down anything attached (which includes
live SAP systems, DB servers, a pretty large VMWare infrastructure, ...).
Cisco (SAN Switches) - So far have been really good, and have actually
know the SAN products better than some of the vendors themselves.
Just my 2 cents.
Nick
Scott Ehrlich wrote:
A followup to the SCSI/SAS question -
I'm looking for RAID options for at least 10 TB to attach to a Dell
PowerEdge 2950 running RHEL 5 64-bit Server.
The system will act as a single sign-on server for XP and Linux, thus
storing user's data from mounted home directories exported from the
server to various workstations. It may also house a database. I'll
need a storage solution starting at least 10 TB.
Most of the SAS devices I've seen go up to 2 TB. Looking at the IBM
System Storage devices, for example, they offer 12 TB and up.
I'm not sure of the budget, so I'll discount cost for now.
How good are IBM's rack RAID devices? I'm just looking at their
System Storage DS4xxx line.
How about EMC? Network Appliance? Clariion?
Quality of unit, reliability of unit andservice and support, overall
cost of ownership? Expandability?
Thanks for any and all insights.
Scott
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