I would also jump in here and comment that while you say your needs are simple, they may not be in the future.
Additionally you will want to take a look at the software offerings of each vendor. I work for a storage vendor myself and I'm not going to pitch you on one, but here is what I will tell you. If you just want a bunch of disk that is redundant, ANYONE will sell you that and you can buy it mega cheap. Open the back pages of PCWorld and you will find a dozen of them waiting for your call. But if you actually want this stuff to work for YOU and ultimately save you time, money, and your data, you need to look at what types of applications these vendors are going to include. What do you use to provision LUNS? How do you do snapshots, backups, replication, manage data like Exchange or SQL, etc? Can they do native deduplication of data? All of this stuff is important and while you may not realize it now, you should. You go buy a big box of disk and you are going to find yourself hitting a brick wall at some point down the way. Understand how each vendor does snapshots and what kind of storage and performance impact it is going to have on your storage device. From: Jonathan Link [mailto:jonathan.l...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 8:37 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: NAS/SAN The transition from DAS to network storage requires a bit more planning. Left unsaid in your email is if you're also virtualizing your servers. You haven't quantified you're actually using now. IF you want 5 TB and you're using 3 TB now, 5 may not be sufficient. I would also suggest that you need to factor spindle count into your matrix. You don't want' just gobs of storage, you want to maintain throughput as well. Then, given the risks of recovering from a hard disk failure you should also carefully consider the RAID implementations (and disk size) allowed for each type of device. I ended up selecting an EqualLogic unit at 2 TB (8x250GB disks). The performance has been great, but I underestimated how much storage I would actually end up needing. I'm buying another 2 TB next year. Once you have the capability of doing snapshots and you fully virtualize your infrastructure your network storage needs rise dramatically. -Jonathan On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:06 AM, John Aldrich <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> wrote: So, we're working on getting our first big "storage appliance" here. As the IT Manager it's my job to get quotes, etc. I'm talking to all the "big boys" out there and getting a lot of good quotes. My requirements are fairly simple: 1) On the order of 5 Terabytes of storage (significantly more than we are using currently.) 2) Redundant everything (disks, controllers, network, power, etc.) That's about it. We are looking, eventually, to bring email in-house, probably using Kerio mail server as it's got the features we need at a price we can live with. The problem is that I'm getting quotes all over the place. The last quote I got was for a QNap ISCSI NAS with 6 1 Tb drives, but it doesn't have the redundancy I'm looking for (no redundant controllers.) I've gotten quotes from vendors for HP, LSI, NetApp, QNap and am working on an Equallogic quote. Anyone else I should be looking at? Our plan is to get two of these for DR/Business Continuity purposes and have one of them at a remote office, and possibly even back the remote one up to tape. J Am I being too paranoid? Not enough? Anything else I should be looking at? At first I was really wanting single-instance storage, but the LSI vendor kind of talked me out of that being a requirement. I get a report every night from the current storage detailing all duplicate files, and there aren't that many so I think I can get away with not having de-duplication/single-instance storage. Your thoughts, please? John-AldrichTile-Tools ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
<<image001.jpg>>
<<image002.jpg>>
