I will post something once I get it up and running.
cheers
ski
On 08/16/2013 10:42 AM, Adam Levin wrote:
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
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"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
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