My 2.5 cents worth is to get two Dell Equallogic arrays, one for your corporate site, and one for your remote site. You'd want to maximize the number of spindles in the arrays, since you will be hosting email at some point. The Equallogic boxes can do replication (which are really snapshots taken on the remote array), or you could use something like Datacore to do async mirroring. Putting Datacore in the mix will drive your costs up considerably, though. Either way, if your deltas are large, you'll either need to bump the bandwidth or get wan accelerators.
The Equallogic arrays serve up the storage via iSCSI, which simplifies things in many respects. That's my opinion, worth way more than you paid for it! :-) ________________________________ From: John Aldrich [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 10:07 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Home-brew SAN vs name-brand storage appliance Ok. To recap what I previously posted... :-) We are wanting to migrate the storage role off our DCs and have a redundant storage device at a remote location. The link between those locations is a hardware VPN between two ASA devices. At the remote location, we have a 5 Mbit Metro Ethernet connection. At the main office we have a 2 Mbit metro-e connection. We are currently using about 150-200 gigs of storage on each of two servers. We want to leave room for growth so I can redirect "my documents" and such for every desktop (about 100-125 users, including senior managers and C-level executives.) Also, we plan on bringing email in-house sooner rather than later. My current plan is to use Kerio Mail Server, and they say on their website that for my user level, I should make sure I have between 100-200 Gigs of disk space. I figure to be on the safe side, I should plan on up to about 500 gigs of drive space for email. Add that to the probable doubling of our current usage at a minimum when I add the "my documents" and such, we're right at a terabyte there. A potential vendor suggested that to leave room for growth, etc, I might want to plan on about 5 Tb of disk space. Also, I would want to replicate any changes made to files on the primary storage appliance to the remote / DR storage appliance on an async basis. Files would be shared out over the DCs as they currently are, only instead of the files being stored locally they would be sharing out files from the primary storage appliance. I am wanting to do this with server-class hardware, not a PC. What I like about a SAN is that they can and do come with redundant everything, including controllers, NICs, power supplies, etc. My concern is that if I get a server and attach a RAID array to it, if the RAID controller fails, I'm SOL until I get a replacement RAID controller. With a SAN, I don't have to worry about that, as it has a redundant RAID controller attached to the RAID box fabric. Now, what would you folks recommend? :-) ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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