Yeah, we saw the pricing of the Tintri and Tegile to be a little high, but then they are also doing dedupe, which can give better value depending on the use case. We definitely only see Tintri as useful as VMWare datastores, but the 13TB chunks didn't bother us.
I'm curious what you'll think of the Fujitsu. They will be presenting to us in a couple of weeks as a possible SAN platform for some apps that need a lot of capacity and not a whole lot of performance, and it sounds like they are very competitively priced, so I'm looking forward to hearing about them. -Adam On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Ski Kacoroski <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > First, thanks to everyone who commented on my question and especially to > Adam for mentioning Tintri as it was incredibly interesting. Please note > that these comments are based on our environment and assumptions. > > In the end we went with the Fujitsu SAN. Our thinking went like this: > > - We looked at EMC VNX5300, Fujitsu DX90, Tegile, Dell/Equallogic, Nimble, > and Tintri. We classified these into 3 groups: > * Traditional - use lots of disks to get IOPs (EMC, Fujitsu) > * Hybrid - use software and a mix of slow SATA disks with SSDs > (Dell/Equallogic, Tegile, Nimble) > * New - like a hybrid in hardware, but does not use luns, instead storage > units based on vm's and vmdks (Tintri) > > - Dell/Equallogic was dropped due to bad experiences with them deprecating > equipment (PS5000s) before their lifetime was up, replication is a > non-starter due to large blocks, and they provided no cost advantage over > the Fujitsu. Until now we have been very happy with them. > > - EMC was dropped as their cost was 28% higher than the Fujitsu and their > sales process was extremely painful - the VAR basically gave up. I do have > a VNX5300 that I use for NAS services and like it, but they really need to > improve SMB sales and support as they made every effort to *not* sell me a > new SAN. > > - The Nimble and Tegile cost 25% - 37% higher than the Fujitsu and we did > not see enough benefits to justify the cost as we would still have to > manage luns, etc. In addition you are locked in to upgrades in large > chunks, maintenance costs are higher, and there is the potential to be very > slow if you get stuck reading from the slow disks. > > - The Tintri we really liked, however its costs was 57% higher which > included an incredible discount that I doubt we would ever see again. The > idea of having the SAN work in terms of vm's and vmdks instead of luns is > very powerful for snapshots, backups, debugging, etc. It is also very > simple to set up and use (although once I get the Fujitsu set up, I will > rarely have to touch it again). Problems are upgrades in 13TB chunks, only > works with vmware, high software maintenance, and probably very high cost > to upgrade. We just could not justify it especially when in a year VMWare > is suppose to come out with vvols which will allow traditional SANs to do > vm level snapshots which will duplicate some of the functionality of the > Tintri. > > Hope this is useful for other folks. > > cheers, > > ski > > > On 08/05/2013 09:09 AM, Ski Kacoroski wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I am looking for a new SAN for my 7 node, 200+ vm vmware cluster. I >> currently have a Dell Equallogic SAN with one hybrid node (completely >> full so I need to add on more fast storage space) and 5 regular nodes of >> which 3 are going to be EOL by Dell in a year (for no good reason). I >> have narrowed my choices down to EMC (because I already have a VNX for >> NAS services), Fujitsu, and Nimble Storage. >> >> From what I can see, the EMC and Fujitsu are your old school style of >> SAN with lots of smaller disks to get the IOPs needed and lots of >> flexibility (and more complexity) in setting them up while Nimble is >> using software algorithms to get performance and they focus on >> simplicity (kind of like the Dell). I am tempted by the Nimble as I >> work in a very resource constrained environment and simple is good, but >> I am a bit concerned about how they will perform over a variety of >> workloads. >> >> So I appreciate your thoughts on Nimble vs traditional SAN's. What >> workloads does a Nimble not do well on? Are there any special features >> to a Fujitsu or EMC VNX that would make them better with vmware? >> >> Thanks in advance. >> >> cheers, >> >> ski >> >> > -- > "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it > connected to the entire universe" John Muir > > Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, [email protected], 206-501-9803 > or ski98033 on most IM services > ______________________________**_________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-**bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss<https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss> > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ >
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