Be very careful when the vendors start pitching all of the great features their arrays offer. EMC for example; Yes it will do storage tiering and it also has an awesome feature allowing you to leverage Solid State Drives (they call them Enterprise Flash Drives) as additional cache. However, these features are not standard and do cost quite a bit of money. Even the ability to do snapshots or clone LUNs is an additional cost. Maintenance fees on the Clariions starts to get pretty steep after 2-3 years of service.
EQL on the other hand inclues a lot of built-in functionality like snapshots, array-to-array replications, etc. without charging more. I hear they will soon (or maybe have already) provide CIFS/NFS but that will require an additional array. I also hear that Dedupe and Compression are coming. If you're using Windows quotas, you must have a Windows server providing file services to your clients. At that point, it really doesn't matter what your storage solution is on the backend. We're an EMC shop for the most part. I've got 2 CX700s and a CX4-960 serving almost 200TB of space. We've got a couple of IBM (netapp) filers for our backup environment. Even with all of that, I like the EQL solution. It's simple, relatively inexpensive (compared to what we've been spending) and it flat out performs. We had 3 arrays for a few months during a proof of concept for VMWare. We'll most likely be implementing a handful of EQL arrays when finally get our Virtualization project off the ground. The CX700 arrays will get retired and our CX4-960 will stick around for our heavy SQL apps, Exchange, etc. - Sean On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:06 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks Sean and everyone else, I had an offsite meeting I had to go to > right after posting my question so sorry for the delay in getting back to > you. > > > > The depth of questions you guys are offering shows there’s a bunch I don’t > yet understand so my answers may not be as coherent as you deserve. > > > > I’ve looked at Equalogic, Netapp, Lefthand and EMC. From the IT folks in > our AEC Engineering industry who shared their setups, all had good > experience with these vendors. Different people just had different > preferences to different capabilities so that’s why I thought I should run > it by this group. > > > > They all seemed to be able to perform the necessary shared storage > functionality just in different ways. > > Most vendors like the Equalogic, required you to buy fully populated > shelves even though you may not need that much space which added cost. The > flexibility of the snapshots with EMC “seemed”, to my inexperienced eyes, to > be more robust that others in that you could, among other things, restore a > snapshot without losing all the other snapshots, mount snapshots as drives, > etc. How much value this truly has over time I don’t know but it seemed > more flexible. I also like the ability for the system to automatically move > data to slower or faster drives as needed. > > > > We have a lot of runaway users so we rely on quotas to keep users from > adding 10 GB a day of crap and quotas have worked out well in this regard. > As such, it’s my understanding that I need to go with the NAS functionality > to support Windows quotas and AD permissions. I’m told that the NAS > functionality of the array provides the ability to present CIFS shares (and > NFS) to our users. > > > > Obviously, having never had a SAN, there’s a bunch I don’t understand or > even know to ask but every vendor seems able to do the job. Technically, > they all seem to meet our needs and I can point to several companies in my > industry who uses each of these vendors so choosing the “best” one is > daunting! I definitely like the US tech support, the 4 hours onsite support > etc, future expandability, etc. > > > > We have about 24 TB of data but a lot of it is online archive data that we > must keep online. > > > > Jim > > > > > > > > > > > > *From:* Sean Martin [mailto:[email protected]] > *Sent:* Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:58 PM > > *To:* NT System Admin Issues > *Subject:* Re: First Steps into the SAN Arena > > > > If you're looking at the NS line I would definitely talk to Dell about > Equalogics. > > > Are you planning on utilizing the CIFS or NFS features? If not, look at the > CX4 line as they support iSCSI and Fiber Channel. I agree with Anders that > the Celerra interface is not the most intuitive and is overly complex. > However, I believe they're moving from Navisphere and Celerra to Unisphere > which combines both interfaces into one that can manage all of the > Clariions. There's apparently a lot of integration with Unisphere and > VSphere. Haven't had a chance to play with it yet. I was in the planning > stages of upgrading our CX4-960 to FLARE 30 (required to upgrade to > Unisphere) but apparently there's a couple of critical issues so EMC is > recommending we hold off until the hotfixes are released sometime in > December. > > > > - Sean > > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Anders Blomgren <[email protected]> > wrote: > > That behind that admitedly much improved gui the celerra is a complex > beast. > > > > That quite a few more complex system changes require an EMC Technitian. > > > > That being said, I do like our Celerra. And probably wont get another one > when our current one needs replacing. The celerra is clariion storage and a > file serving box which is unnecessarily complex for our needs. I'll probably > increase the storage for our vsphere cluster and stand up a windows vm. > > > > So it all depends on your actual needs, i.e. number of vsphere hosts and > nas clients. > > > > Probably more than you asked for but i get the feeling that EMC is > targeting smb's with a product that they don't always have the resources to > manage. > > > > -Anders > > > Sent from my iPhone > > > On 18 nov 2010, at 23:45, "[email protected]" < > [email protected]> wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I know there are many vendors and ways to skin the SAN gopher but I’m > leaning towards this basic system as it meets our specs: > > > > EMC NS-120 10GB/s Celerra System > > Dual Data Movers > > Dual SPS > > NFS > > CIFS > > > > Seems they’re offering a pretty good price. > > > > I’m looking to virtualize with VMWare VSphere and think this SAN backend > will meet our needs. > > > > My question is, does anyone have any experience with EMC Celerra systems or > EMC in general? > Would I be making a big mistake going with EMC or the Celerra from a > support or stability perspective? > > > > Being new to SAN’s I don’t have a lot of experience so are there any > gotcha’s I should be looking for? Any pieces of info EMC sales guys > frequent forget to offer up? > > > > Please feel free to render any advice one way or the other. > > > > Thanks > > > > Jim > > > > ~ 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 > > ~ 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 > > > > ~ 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 > > ~ 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 > ~ 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
