I never found SANs worth it for a small shop, primarily due to cost. With the advent of virtualisation these costs have come down. I have recently done the sums on my 3 year replacement cycle and I can throw VMWare enterprise and SAN and save 20% on capital costs vs doing it the old tried and tru replacement method and get better DR and availability options YMMV
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Greg Olson Sent: Thursday, 16 August 2007 05:02 To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: EMC as data store for Exchange? IMHO, it's a waste of money for most shops. We've got our Exchange servers on a CX-700 array, on one 4 disk raid 10 for the logs and another 7 disk Raid 5 for the stores, with about 1800 mailboxes. It works great, but when you look at the costs of the disks, shelf costs, Fiber ports, Power Path license, etc, it really isn't worth it until you get to the higher number of mailboxes (EX 4000+) even then with 07 still probably not worth it. As each FC disk really need to be dedicated to exchange and with 15k 146gb FC drives still going for about 1295.00 each, you could easily do the same thing on a dedicated MSA 500\1000\1500 (Insert you favorite dedicated disk array here) for half the cost, and get the same or better performance. Really EMC disk arrays on a san are of a different mindset than an Exchange admin would prefer, imho you setup disk arrays on the san to maximize the available space across all the disks, and arrange then to still deliver pretty good performance. You don't really want to dedicate disks for any one application as Exchange 2k\2k3 would like, as it's just too expensive, and you end up wasting what the array is built for. Just my $.02 worth though. ********************************************************************** Have you clicked on yet? www.nrc.govt.nz ********************************************************************** NORTHLAND REGIONAL COUNCIL This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify [EMAIL PROTECTED] ********************************************************************** _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Web Interface: http://intm-dl.sparklist.com/read/?forum=exchange To subscribe: http://e-newsletters.internet.com/discussionlists.html/ To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
