I agree, if all you need is disk space and are going to use your other toolsets for replication, backups etc, then I would look at a jbod with an iscsi front end or nfs front end. You can get a fast adaptec sas pci-x controller and get a generic sas/sata hotswap 10 bay cage for under 1k unpopulated. The drives can be bought at street prices and grow and resize as you need.
However, like Martin is saying the san vendors have put some logic behind their products to maintain pricing. I still think datacore has one of the better products out there for straight san+replication. I guess because it runs within a windows shell I guess its not seen as enterprise worthy. IBM uses/used it on their shark product line (iirc) and loved it and I think bundled it in. From: Martin Blackstone [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 11:08 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Virtualization Questions Don't think SAN vendors haven't taken notice of that. That's why when evaluating, you need to look at the applications. Let's face it, ANYONE can sell you a bunch of cheap disk. The back pages of PCMagazine and full of players. But, look at what else they can offer you. Things like native snapshots, replication, dynamic resizing, deduplication, application hooks into things like SQL, VMWare, Exchange, etc. If those things are not important to you in a SAN, then by all means, look elsewhere. From: RM [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 7:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Virtualization Questions Seconded. Mgmt is hellbent on EMC. The storage (for tier 1) is over $10k/TB when you include the shelf and whatever else is needed. On the other hand, there are nice little 2U and 3U SAN's from companies like IBM which use SAS disk that mere mortals can afford. Less than $2k/TB for SAS and way less for SATA. RM On Mon, 5 Jan 2009 06:14:08 -0800, "David Lum" <[email protected]> said: " Once you have a SAN you will never go back to direct attached disk." Until you see the price tag for a SAN HDD that needs replaced. At least for the SAN we have here as the price per GB is lousy compared to standard SAS drives. Don't get me wrong, we use a decent size SAN here (a few TB's IIRC), but if we had to replace a HDD off warranty...ouch. David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
