My frame of reference is different from his. -sc
-----Original Message----- From: William J. Robbins [mailto:dangerw...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 10:52 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN vendors Einstein said you weren't relevant. ;) WJR - from my Crackberry. "If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." -----Original Message----- From: "Steven M. Caesare" <scaes...@caesare.com> Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 10:38:38 To: NT System Admin Issues<ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> Reply-To: "NT System Admin Issues" <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com>Subject: RE: SAN vendors You'd be surprised what's relevant. For instance, you have already received responses indicating that Outlook can do what you want, depending on version. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have that info. -sc -----Original Message----- From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 10:28 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors No, my home email client is KMail. Linux is the O/S. I figured it would be understood that the computer at home was running Linux from what I said and I figured a lot of people on this list might not know what KMail is, plus I did not think it was relevant to this conversation what *specific* email client I use on my Linux box. :-) From: Steven M. Caesare [mailto:scaes...@caesare.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 10:16 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN vendors “Linux” is your home email client? You keep making applications assertions about the OS. Why? -sc -----Original Message----- From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 8:53 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors Well, I wouldn't say "contractually obligated" but I would put it as "strongly encouraged." I'll try and remember to switch to plain text for this list. :-) Won't guarantee I'll remember, but I'll try. One thing I like about my email client at home (Linux) is that I can change certain settings for each mailing list I'm on, such as when posting to the list, I can choose which email address to use, etc. I wish Outlook had similar capabilities. :-( From: William J. Robbins [mailto:dangerw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 5:10 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN vendors Gotcha. So are you contractually obligated to send that swatch as advertisement through the inter-tubes? That's one hefty sig line and I've made some doosies myself. WJR - from my Crackberry. "If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." ________________________________________ From: "John Aldrich" <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 17:05:27 -0400 To: NT System Admin Issues<ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> ReplyTo: "NT System Admin Issues" <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> Subject: RE: SAN vendors The Sig line is a small picture of one of our carpets. As for staff… the only staff I’ve ever had got swiped for Claims/Tech. From: William J. Robbins [mailto:dangerw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 5:01 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN vendors Well that'll do it I reckon. So did you have staff and they just swept them under the rug? Or did you inherit a promised team that never materialized? Speaking of rugs, whilst I'm asking questions, what the hell is that in your sig line? WJR - from my Crackberry. "If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck." ________________________________________ From: "John Aldrich" <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:35:40 -0400 To: NT System Admin Issues<ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> ReplyTo: "NT System Admin Issues" <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> Subject: RE: SAN vendors I’m the only person in the IT department. ☺ From: William Robbins [mailto:dangerw...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 3:51 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: SAN vendors A point of curiosity here if you will...why are you, as an IT manger playing with SAN equipment? Isn't this a task you can/should delegate? (Or maybe I've been listening to too many manager-tools.com pod-casts of late?) - WJR On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 14:46, John Aldrich <jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com> wrote: Good point. As I said, I just want something to “play” with to see what I *absolutely* need…. I have my own dual-CPU (P3/Celeron) motherboard. I should just need to add a RAID card and some drives and have something to play with. As for user-count and IOPS, etc. well… my user count is probably about the 75 user mark, and I don’t have anything particularly disk-intensive. Mainly just file/print/DC/Antivirus/etc. That’s what makes me think I could probably do what is suggested here and play around with the esxi and the freeware LeftHand software. From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 3:02 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors Doesn’t sound pretty tbh, main thing is check the ESX HCL. For testing you may be able to use vmware server or workstation, you’d need to check – OK the performance will suck but you’ll be able to play with the concepts of the VSA. Are you thinking of replacing your existing server hardware? I ask the question as, for example, a pair of Dell R710’s run around $6k each, stick a VSA on each and your production machines and you’ve got a pretty cheap cluster. I’m saying all this without knowing your user count, IOPS, but from how I’m interpreting your posts I’m reading it as, if I was in your shoes, if I had $30k I wouldn’t be putting it all into a SAN. From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: 13 September 2010 19:00 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors Ok…so I have an old dual-CPU machine I can build up as a “test bed.” It’s old and slow and currently only does PATA. If I got a PCI SATA RAID card, and 3 or 4 SATA 500 GB drives, do you think that would make a decent test machine to play with? From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 1:25 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors There aren’t many vendors that will do block de-dupe (as a standard feature) other than Netapp. Lefthand is nice kit, my biggest reservation (and of course this is not aimed solely to Lefthand) is that all it does is iSCSI. The good things are it’s modular, you can tier (SATA and SAS) and as you add nodes you add redundancy and performance, and of course you get all the licenses included. Personally I’d go grab a spare box, slap ESXi on it, download the Lefthand VSA and give it a try – it’s no different from the hardware SAN and you might find that it’s an ideal fit for your environment as you can use one or both of your existing servers rather than having to buy a hardware SAN that you may not get close to utilizing. I agree with Jonathan in that it’s very easy to get bogged down when you don’t have a nailed on set of requirements, you just want to get the best bang for your buck and you have to spend wisely (I know as I’m in the SAN market right now). From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: 13 September 2010 18:18 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors Ok… good questions. I’m looking for about 5 terabytes useable to start. I probably won’t use half of that immediately, but I can use some of that for snapshots and growth. As for features, I’m not sure what features are available, but some I know are available and are interesting to me are dedupe, ISCSI, snapshots, thin provisioning. Dedupe is in the “nice to have, but not necessary” category. Performance, well, to start with, this will be mainly an overgrown file server, but I plan on bringing email in-house, and the IBM rep suggested I might want to virtualize my two servers and put VMWare on them, as they are seriously under-utilized right now (our most used server is at like 15% CPU utilization, and that’s running file/print/DC/DHCP/DNS/antivirus on the one box.) The IBM rep’s suggestions sound good, as far as virtualizing the servers, but not until I have a SAN in place. ☺ Anyway, WRT the SAN, it will likely be the place where the virtualized DCs are stored, but they will be running off the existing hardware. The email will likely be Kerio Connect (pretty much guaranteed, if I have anything to say about it) and I don’t think it uses a database. I talked to a Kerio rep last week and he assured me that having the mail store on a SAN is very well supported, so I have no qualms about that. Between redirecting people’s “My Documents” folders to the network (and by that, I mean a SAN) and email, I expect to use up ½ to 2/3 of the proposed 5 Tb. From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:paul.hutchi...@mira.co.uk] Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 12:55 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: SAN vendors John, what do you need? Capacity? Expansion? Features (now and potentially future)? Performance? From: John Aldrich [mailto:jaldr...@blueridgecarpet.com] Sent: 13 September 2010 17:49 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SAN vendors Ok, I’m still in the market for a SAN. I got an IBM rep trying to sell me one of their SANs (rebranded LSI Logic) and I have an HP vendor trying to sell me a LeftHand. On the one hand (no pun intended,) the LeftHand comes with pretty much everything I would ever want built-into the price. On the other hand, the IBM is a dual-controller unit and I can just add drives as I need them where with the LeftHand I’d be adding intelligence each time I upgraded. There are pros and cons to each. I think both are similarly priced (although the LeftHand solution may be a bit more expensive up-front.) Not trying to start a flame war here, but I’m getting overwhelmed here… If both had similar capabilities, what would you recommend here? Anyone else I should be looking at in the “Budget SAN” range (<$30K for one SAN, including setup, maintenance, etc.) ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ________________________________________ MIRA Ltd Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 VAT Registration GB 114 5409 96 The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of the intended recipient. 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