Here's the ESRP for 2010. I provided the link for 2007 because a lot more vendors have participated.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/ff182054.aspx Jason, you make some interesting points. I need to remember that when providing my opinion, ommitting important information can sometimes be hazardous. Performance is the number one consideration in my environment. When looking at the Equalogics, I liked the grid architecture that allows for linear scalability of both capacity and performance. I was also impressed with the effeciency of the unit in terms of disk IOPS. Its as if they can pull 2-3 times the IOPS off a SATA disk over other vendors. Anyway, the important thing is to understand your objectives and requirements and then determine which vendor best meets those. - Sean On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 6:57 AM, Jason Gurtz <jasongu...@npumail.com> wrote: > > http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb412164.aspx > > > > Pay particular attention to each vendor's hardware configuration and > > compare that to the amount of load (number of mailboxes) they were able > > to handle and still provide reasonable disk response times. (I believe > > under 20ms is the target). > > This is a pretty great tool from the Exchange POV. It is also very good > advice to the OP to do much research before locking in to a storage > vendor. We looked at a number of storage vendors, spending the most time > on the perceived market leaders: Equalogic, EMC, and NetApp, but also some > smaller or up and comers: GreenBytes, Nexentia, DataCore, Xiotech, > LeftHand, and Coraid. Every vendor has their own strengths and > weaknesses. Equalogic is certainly a great product and value but we found > it was much more expensive when we took the long view in our situation. > Here's an example why we didn't go down the Equalogic path: > > The SAN, in our case, is used by additional services other than Exchange > and will grow with time. The distributed style architecture of Equalogic > et al (where each disk shelf houses controllers) is great for scaling > performance but not so good when you consider the monetary costs of > scaling. > > For example, a higher end Equalogic solution was a little more than $50K > for a single shelf of drives (about 3TB). When that isn't enough space, > or more likely, we need to add more spindles of performance, there goes > another $50K for a shelf of drives. Had we decided that redundant > controllers were not a requirement this would have had a smaller, $30K > impact. A Lower-mid tier NetApp solution (FAS2040) is, say, around $100K > (about 5TB useable primary storage). Each shelf of drives is a bit less > than $15K though, so as storage scales the cost is manageable. There are > also a lot of software features in that $100K. No doubt these prices will > drop down the line for all vendors--if not already--but I think it > illustrates why it is important to consider more than current needs only. > > A point against NetApp is the need to somewhat over-spec to attain the > same performance as other more traditional SAN vendors. In the long view > that didn't seem to matter. > > I like everyone's points in the rest of this thread about backup and > recovery. Many SAN vendors have solutions in this problem-space as well. > They are worth a look. > > ~JasonG > > > > >
