My boss did this calculation - it is usually true that at some point tray based systems can meet or beat the same cost/GB as the EQL - for the systems we were comparing (FAS3040 vs EQL PS6500e) it was around the 300TB mark. Of course this all depends on what kind of deal you can get with your vendor, how many shelves you buy at once, what features you need to enable on the Netapp, etc. Dell gave us a killer price on our first two PS6500e's to lock us in - we are looking at buying one or two more and the new quote is coming in about 6K more for the exact same system 6 months later.
A few things to be aware of: If you go the Netapp route, I would keep in mind the cost of snapmirror for your replication later - it isn't cheap. On the EQL side - the snapshot overhead is much higher than the Netapp. The default snap reserve on Netapp volumes is 20% and on EQL is 100%. The same is true for replication - the default replication reserve on the EQL side is 300% if I remember correctly. It all depends on your change rate, retention policy, etc but there is a significant difference between the two. mark From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 4:15 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN Storage One of the things that concerns me about Lefthand and EQL is that they are "node" based - good for performance scale out but it means that at certain points you're committed to paying for a new tray complete with spindles and controllers whilst with other vendors you pay up front for the controllers but (hopefully) have slightly lower costs when you want to add disks as (trays aside) all you're doing is adding disks. The capacity we need (around 15tb usable) isn't a nice number for either EQL or Lefthand as it means multiple nodes. I should add to my original post that whilst budgets may mean we can't do it from day one, we do have a DR location with fast fibre to our main location as we'd like to have full replication of data to this location - we don't need instant failover or anything, but the intention is that it would have to be a very bad day before we'd have to hit the tapes. From: Steve Ens [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30 August 2010 20:54 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN Storage I just implemented the LeftHand starter SAN 7.2TB...two nodes with network RAID. The performance is amazing. 500MB transfer from SAN to local disk in two or three seconds. On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I'm looking to add in a LH unit to the two that we already have. The newer software (8.0) supports a kind of network RAID. My LHs are pretty small (4tb raw) and replicate to each other, so I only have the 4tb minus the formatting (roughly 3.7tb). The ability to add in a unit of the same size, keep using two-way replication across three units and basically double my storage, is pretty appealing, along with the probable gain in throughput from the extra unit on the wire. Plus, relatively speaking the original units were pretty cheap. I'm getting pricing from CDW and a couple of local firms in the next few days, so I don't have a good guess on current pricing, but I'll bet it's still cheaper than the bigger players, in spite of the fact that HP bought LH a year or two ago. Kurt On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 08:30, Paul Hutchings <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > Looking for a little feedback folks. > > > > We've got a SAN replacement coming up in a few months. We're pretty much a > vmware shop except where a service has to run on a physical server (IO cards > etc.). > > > > The vendors I'm primarily looking at are Lefthand, Equallogic and Netapp, > and possibly EMC since Dell can quote on an EMC solution as well as > Equallogic. > > > > I've not had quotes yet, but so far my instincts are leaning towards Netapp, > mainly because of the things I keep hearing about NFS for vmware, as well as > the fact they seem to offer a lot of flexibility whereas Lefthand and > Equallogic offer iSCSI and, well yeah, they offer iSCSI. > > > > Be interested to hear any experiences, especially around vmware and > replication between SANs at live/backup sites (not a live failover site but > a "this will take a little work but we have a copy of the data that's an > hour old" site). > > ________________________________ > MIRA Ltd > Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England > Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 > VAT Registration GB 114 5409 96 > The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of > the intended recipient. If you receive this e-mail in error, please delete > it and notify us either by e-mail, telephone or fax. You should not copy, > forward or otherwise disclose the content of the e-mail as this is > prohibited. ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
