Hi,
First, thanks to everyone who commented on my question and especially to
Adam for mentioning Tintri as it was incredibly interesting. Please note
that these comments are based on our environment and assumptions.
In the end we went with the Fujitsu SAN. Our thinking went like this:
- We looked at EMC VNX5300, Fujitsu DX90, Tegile, Dell/Equallogic,
Nimble, and Tintri. We classified these into 3 groups:
* Traditional - use lots of disks to get IOPs (EMC, Fujitsu)
* Hybrid - use software and a mix of slow SATA disks with SSDs
(Dell/Equallogic, Tegile, Nimble)
* New - like a hybrid in hardware, but does not use luns, instead
storage units based on vm's and vmdks (Tintri)
- Dell/Equallogic was dropped due to bad experiences with them
deprecating equipment (PS5000s) before their lifetime was up,
replication is a non-starter due to large blocks, and they provided no
cost advantage over the Fujitsu. Until now we have been very happy with
them.
- EMC was dropped as their cost was 28% higher than the Fujitsu and
their sales process was extremely painful - the VAR basically gave up. I
do have a VNX5300 that I use for NAS services and like it, but they
really need to improve SMB sales and support as they made every effort
to *not* sell me a new SAN.
- The Nimble and Tegile cost 25% - 37% higher than the Fujitsu and we
did not see enough benefits to justify the cost as we would still have
to manage luns, etc. In addition you are locked in to upgrades in large
chunks, maintenance costs are higher, and there is the potential to be
very slow if you get stuck reading from the slow disks.
- The Tintri we really liked, however its costs was 57% higher which
included an incredible discount that I doubt we would ever see again.
The idea of having the SAN work in terms of vm's and vmdks instead of
luns is very powerful for snapshots, backups, debugging, etc. It is also
very simple to set up and use (although once I get the Fujitsu set up, I
will rarely have to touch it again). Problems are upgrades in 13TB
chunks, only works with vmware, high software maintenance, and probably
very high cost to upgrade. We just could not justify it especially when
in a year VMWare is suppose to come out with vvols which will allow
traditional SANs to do vm level snapshots which will duplicate some of
the functionality of the Tintri.
Hope this is useful for other folks.
cheers,
ski
On 08/05/2013 09:09 AM, Ski Kacoroski wrote:
Hi,
I am looking for a new SAN for my 7 node, 200+ vm vmware cluster. I
currently have a Dell Equallogic SAN with one hybrid node (completely
full so I need to add on more fast storage space) and 5 regular nodes of
which 3 are going to be EOL by Dell in a year (for no good reason). I
have narrowed my choices down to EMC (because I already have a VNX for
NAS services), Fujitsu, and Nimble Storage.
From what I can see, the EMC and Fujitsu are your old school style of
SAN with lots of smaller disks to get the IOPs needed and lots of
flexibility (and more complexity) in setting them up while Nimble is
using software algorithms to get performance and they focus on
simplicity (kind of like the Dell). I am tempted by the Nimble as I
work in a very resource constrained environment and simple is good, but
I am a bit concerned about how they will perform over a variety of
workloads.
So I appreciate your thoughts on Nimble vs traditional SAN's. What
workloads does a Nimble not do well on? Are there any special features
to a Fujitsu or EMC VNX that would make them better with vmware?
Thanks in advance.
cheers,
ski
--
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
connected to the entire universe" John Muir
Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, [email protected], 206-501-9803
or ski98033 on most IM services
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