Be sure to take a close look at the applications that are available for each appliance.
Can the appliance do both SAN and NAS? What are their provisioning tools like? How easy can you provision a LUN? Backup and Recovery. Compliance? What are their Exchange / SQL tools like? Or whatever other applications you may use. Watch their snapshot technology and keep a close eye on performance impact during a snapshot. With ESX, we were originally running over ISCSI but I've recently moved everything to NFS storage. I find it to be much more flexible. VMware is also a prime candidate for deduplication, so ask if your vendor offers dedupe technologies. From: Jeffrey Showen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, June 29, 2008 3:58 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: New SAN Selection Question I'm looking for a methodology to evaluate new Storage Area Network solutions for our enterprise environment. We have tight power, weight, and support requirements and have narrowed the field to 8 vendors based on a variety of these (and other) threshold requirements. The challenge now is that the vendor submissions/solutions are mostly so close to each other that a paper evaluation fails to significantly differentiate them. We are on a tight schedule (management - don't ask) and it looks like we will end up testing I/O on solutions from all 8 vendors (Dell, EMC, IBM, NetApp, LeftHand Networks, Sun, Overland, HP). We are an ESX shop - is it enough to just configure the eval SANs (the same) for our environment and then run Iometer tests from a client to the primary SAN(s) or is there a better or more thorough approach? We want to use mirroring/replication at the SAN level between redundant SANs for high availability but that can get expensive so I am open to any ideas here as well. I know this is a big question with sketchy details but there are a lot of moving parts and I was just wondering if someone had done this and could provide insight. Thanks Jeff Showen iGov Systems Engineer Tampa, FL 33619 ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
