Help me purchase a SAN

August 30, 2005 2:10 PM

Can you help me with the purchase of a SAN for my small to medium sized business? We're looking to attach 4-6 servers to ~2-3 TB of storage space.

Our budget is a little flexible, but it looks like it will be <$30,000. We've looked at the HP MSA1500, and the Dell (EMC) AX100. We like the price point of SATA, but we're going to eventually want to move our MS SQL server to the SAN, so SATA only probably won't work. We are open to using both SATA and SCSI, but don't know if SATA will work for anything other than our file server. The MSA1500 supports both SATA and SCSI in a mixed configuration, but it doesn't appear to have the performance we think will be necessary.

How do the IBM DS400 and DS4300 compare to these? Are there others we should be looking at? Are we going to be able to find something that will give us the reliability and speed we want in this price range? Is there a forum where specific SAN solutions are discussed at length so we can better choose a solution?

posted by stovenator to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Have you considered the Apple XSan?
posted by Wild_Eep at 2:17 PM on August 30, 2005

Check out Hitachi - they've some great stuff that's really easy to manage. Their field techs are seriously great too in my experience. Veritas would also be able to show you a variety of solutions as they develop software for managing all types (brands) of storage.
posted by prodevel at 2:46 PM on August 30, 2005

I recently had to buy storage in this price/performance ballpark and chose a Dell/EMC AX100. I'm getting University pricing which came out to about $14K for 3TB. There may be slightly better options out there but this seemed pretty reasonable. Our application is a fairly high-performance prototype astronomical database. Unfortunately I have not set the thing up yet so I can't tell you how well it does or doesn't work.

I don't know diddly about MS SQL Server, but why would it care what kind of disks are in your SAN?
posted by ldenneau at 3:22 PM on August 30, 2005

Xsan.

Xsan.
Xsan.
Xsan.

:)
posted by symphonik at 4:50 PM on August 30, 2005

Seriously, check out the XSan. Our sysadmins here (mixed Mac/PC environment) get misty when they look at ours. It also came out to be, surprisingly, cheaper than other solutions.
posted by mkultra at 5:36 PM on August 30, 2005

Second on the Dell/EMC line of SAN's. Fairly inexpensive and the support is great.

Although, having used the XSan as well, it is a hard decision. However, if price is important than it might be a little more than you could afford (it's not cheap).
posted by purephase at 5:46 PM on August 30, 2005

At work (a university) someone decided to purchase one of the Dell/SMC SAN solutions.

$90,000 for 15 73GB 15k Fibre Channel disks, $128,000 including Fibre Channel card for the server and all kit. Totally ridiculous.

The education price for an xServe Raid with 14 SATA 10k 400GB disks, redundant power supplies, built-in batteries, spare parts for everything, including all kit, is less than $16,000.

Granted, the apple solution uses marginally slower disks, but at that price differential, you could buy two xServe Raids to make up the speed difference. Or four.

There is even a community dedicated to deploying xServe Raids in apple-hostile environments:
http://www.alienraid.org/

This is one situation where Apple is definetly cheaper.
posted by blasdelf at 8:22 PM on August 30, 2005

Don't worry about SCSI vs SATA. The speed gap between them is closing, but the price-performance advantage of SATA is huuuuuuge.

The main advantage of SCSI is that they come in faster spin speeds (upto 15,000 RPM, vs 10,000 for the fastest SATA). This reduces seek latency a little bit, but the really significant performance improvements come from large memory buffers, and appropriate design and tuning.
posted by curtm at 5:58 AM on August 31, 2005