Ease of Configuration: EQ 30 mins mapping drives if you have never played with it before
Total functionality: snapshot, SAN, NAS, replication, etc. Look at costs for each of these. Only a few do it all out of the box without addt'l costs. Evaluation of compliance, security, encryption needs Integration and Support: VMWARE, MS Virtual, etc native. Fault Tolerance and Recoverability: Equalogic was pretty dang impressive when they pulled all the drives out, swapped them around, and then pulled both redundant powers for a hard shutdown and it powered up and everything was instantly available. Never seen this with anyone else. Speed and Throughput: SAS or Fiber /not necessarily faster. EQ gets faster as you add chassis since it forms a matrix between units. Its not just adding storage, its scaling everything.. Scalability: Cost, Performance, Simplicity Replication: EVALUTATE total storage requirements. Differences between entire disk rep and volume rep. Many require between 20% and 150% of the disk space to replication reserved. So 1 TB repl may actually require 2.5TB to do that. Sorry EQ fan here, used Netapp and not impressed with mgmt interface or feature list when I compare it up to EQ. I have 2 friends who use EMC and both have said that they are good units, but require a degree to fully manage it and it does not scale well enough for them without significant cost each time. One thing about EQ, with each chassis you can only do 1 Raid Type across all of the disks. Not a problem with the perf it puts out in most cases, but something to be mindful of. Greg From: Jeffrey Showen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 3:58 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: New SAN Selection Question I'm looking for a methodology to evaluate new Storage Area Network solutions for our enterprise environment. We have tight power, weight, and support requirements and have narrowed the field to 8 vendors based on a variety of these (and other) threshold requirements. The challenge now is that the vendor submissions/solutions are mostly so close to each other that a paper evaluation fails to significantly differentiate them. We are on a tight schedule (management - don't ask) and it looks like we will end up testing I/O on solutions from all 8 vendors (Dell, EMC, IBM, NetApp, LeftHand Networks, Sun, Overland, HP). We are an ESX shop - is it enough to just configure the eval SANs (the same) for our environment and then run Iometer tests from a client to the primary SAN(s) or is there a better or more thorough approach? We want to use mirroring/replication at the SAN level between redundant SANs for high availability but that can get expensive so I am open to any ideas here as well. I know this is a big question with sketchy details but there are a lot of moving parts and I was just wondering if someone had done this and could provide insight. Thanks Jeff Showen iGov Systems Engineer Tampa, FL 33619 ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
