[BBLISA] 10+ TB RAID experiences?

[Nicholas Kathmann]

I've managed the EMC FC series, CX series, and the IBM DS4000 series.  
Over the last couple years, we eventually moved everything off of EMC 
and onto IBM DS4300 Turbos, which I really like and enjoy working with.  
One of the considerations you might want to look at is making sure you 
can use both FC and SATA disks in the same array, that way you can have 
your dbs running on high speed (high cost) "primary" storage and your 
F&P on lower speed (cheap cost) "secondary" storage.  From what I've 
seen so far:

EMC purchased through Dell - Dell has a contract with EMC to only allow 
you to have Dell support the DELL | EMC branded equipment.  Even though 
it's been stable and relatively easy to manage, the licensing and way 
Dell handles things I really don't like.  For instance, if you purchase 
a DELL|EMC SAN from Dell, they will only sell it to you with 
professional services (them installing it for you), and they wanted 
another ~$30-35K for that.  You can get around it by purchasing the 
system as a DAS first, then adding switches later.  Dell's advanced 
systems support is horrible also.  I've had their highest level 
engineers say really dumb things like "What is iSCSI?" and "I know you 
are running linux, but I need you to right click on My Computer..."

EMC purchased separately - Support much better, but I still didn't like 
the Navisphere tiered licensing, and the agent / powerpath licensing 
costs.  EMC support is much better than Dell's support of the same 
products, but I haven't had to call for anything really hard to figure 
out. (usually just failed drive replacements)

IBM - The DS4300s have been really stable, really easy to manage, and 
the IBM tech support is very knowledgeable.  There are two support 
options, one is hardware only and the other includes applications also 
(such as RDAC).  This is truthfully the only system I'll do live system 
upgrades of the SAN switches and controllers during production hours 
without worrying about bringing down anything attached (which includes 
live SAP systems, DB servers, a pretty large VMWare infrastructure, ...).

Cisco (SAN Switches) - So far have been really good, and have actually 
know the SAN products better than some of the vendors themselves. 

Just my 2 cents.

Nick

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> A followup to the SCSI/SAS question -
>
> I'm looking for RAID options for at least 10 TB to attach to a Dell 
> PowerEdge 2950 running RHEL 5 64-bit Server.
>
> The system will act as a single sign-on server for XP and Linux, thus 
> storing user's data from mounted home directories exported from the 
> server to various workstations.  It may also house a database.    I'll 
> need a storage solution starting at least 10 TB.
>
> Most of the SAS devices I've seen go up to 2 TB.  Looking at the IBM 
> System Storage devices, for example, they offer 12 TB and up.
>
> I'm not sure of the budget, so I'll discount cost for now.
>
> How good are IBM's rack RAID devices?   I'm just looking at their 
> System Storage DS4xxx line.
>
> How about EMC?  Network Appliance?    Clariion?
>
> Quality of unit, reliability of unit andservice and support, overall 
> cost of ownership?    Expandability?
>
> Thanks for any and all insights.
>
> Scott
>
> _______________________________________________
> bblisa mailing list
> bblisa at bblisa.org
> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
>
>