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What Makes A Good SAN? 20

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-talk-about dept.
Photon Ghoul asks: "I'm currently researching storage options for my company. We will be choosing a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or SAN (Storage Area Network) solution and are looking at different vendors, including Sun and Network Appliance (but NOT EMC). It must be used in a heterogeneous environment (NT, Sun and Linux), have HA, and easily scaled. I was wondering if readers of Slashdot have had any experience with NAS or SAN vendors. Who should I look at and who should I stay away from? What criteria should I be looking at?" We've talked about SAN Solutions before and there was also a question on the comparisons between SAN and NAS which wasn't well responded to, but had some good information nonetheless. Has the the SAN/NAS landscape changed much since these were asked?
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What Makes A Good SAN? More

What Makes A Good SAN?

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  • Hoboy I love NetApp. As a systems architect, I've met with them twice over the past year or so, and it was only $$ which prevented the purchase and implementation on both occasions. (Not that the stuff wasn't competitively priced, but I was working for a .com that was going under and could barely afford blah blah blah.)

    NetApp has a very extensive and well documented knowledge base, which made me feel very comfortable when looking for IIS integration solutions. Specifically, I wanted to use a NetApp filer to centrally house website content, pulled by redundant IIS installations.

    My experience with many other vendors has been "aw sure, you can do that", and most of them are talking out of their sales-ass. This usually comes after scouring usenet and the like for examples of products as deployed by others. In my case, NetApp had a full, extremely well documented white paper on NetApp integration with IIS, which was the ultimate selling point. It nicely complemented the fact that the hardware is bulletproof, works on anything, and completely replaces the need for serious future investment in individual server storage.

  • So far, I've been impressed with NetApp. A demo at thier site showed that they knew what they were talking about and the cluster failover was awesome. Sun couldn't even show us that for some reason. We get in-house try-before-you-buy producst from both of them this week. Woop. Thanks for the opinion.
  • All you've said is that you're looking at SANs and NAS devices. But what's it going to be used for? This is important.

    As for HA, it's rather common these days. NetApp does seem to have a good solution.

    And why not EMC? Cost? They've got lower end stuff: http://www.emc.com/products/systems/clariion.jsp [emc.com]. We've got two Clariion's coming next week. They'll be point to point SAN, though.

    You might look at the IP4700 as a NAS device. I prefer their HA solution.

    In the end, I've been looking at this exact thing for about four months now. Got any questions? Ask. I've spent a lot of time with bot EMC and NetApp.
  • MTIC has an awesome product and support crew. I've seen the inside of their plant. The stock is in the toilet but ... so is just about everything else!

  • Man, I hate to sound like a shill but... (Score:3)

    by human bean ( 222811 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2000 @05:59PM (#579787)
    NetApp has this stuff down cold. Yeah, you got to pay for it. So what. Even at their MSRP they are way cheaper than the learning curve and development cost of doing this yourself. They blew sun out of thae water not so much on performance but on overall reliability and ease of integration.

    The only grief I've ever had with them is integration into a backup scheme, and most of that was due to legacy mainframe-style backup equipment needing to used.

  • yeah 3ware stuff rocks.

    we have recently trialled their products and found them to be great!

  • **Sigh**
    Yet another GoatSex link - Tripod have been advised.
    --

  • Not EMC? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having thrown away 3 i740 NetApps because of faulty drives, faulty F-CAL cards, faulty cabling, faulty shelves and LOST DATA, we went with EMC.

    We've never looked back. It costs an arm and two legs, but worth every penny. They don't generally have problems, and if *you* fuck it up, they're there to help. The same could not be said with our experience with NetApp.

  • This dead horse may have been flogged already, but here goes again...

    Although the line separating SAN's and NAS is starting to blur in some places, the difference is probably best shown by where (in the IO path) the network lies.

    In a SAN, the network is placed between raw block-addressed storage devices and the host/filesystem. The networking medium here is generally something that has its genesis in internal host bus technology (fibre channel, infiniband, etc), and the storage devices (large RAID arrays, tape libraries, etc) tend to behave just like the HD or CD burner out on your home machine's SCSI bus (SCSI is actually the language most of these fibre channel storage devices speak). The filesystem is the business of attached servers, _NOT_ exposed within the SAN.

    NAS devices, on the other hand, place the network in front of the filesystem. In other words, a NAS box like NetApp's Filer series will actually have a filesystem on it. The networking medium here is often Ethernet (Gbit or otherwise), and hosts connect to the storage devices directly via file-level protocols (NFS, SMB, CIFS, etc).

    So the filesystem is a component of a NAS device, but is _NOT_ a concern for a traditional SAN implementation.
    As for multiple hosts accessing the same data, as you have mentioned, this is certainly within the capability of the networked filesystem onboard your NAS device. In the case of a SAN, although it will generally be possible to make logical volumes accessible to multiple hosts this is not usually usefull (remember, the filesystem is a construct of the host, not the disk itself!).
  • sighup stated earlier, but it bears elaboration: What are you looking for? When you are looking for storage, what are your design goals? Do you just need to expand file storage? NAS may be the answer.. Do you need complete control of your environment and HA? Then SAN is the way to go. (Despite the detractor, SAN _is_ here, and I've seen a few successful implementations) Your design goals will determine what environment you need (you do have those, right? or did Ye Olde PHB decide he wanted "one of those SANS thingies". There are several caveats, of course. There is no market leader in SAN (there are only leaders from other markets, trying to get into san (compaq, sun, etc). Some vendors claim to work with others, but in truth, it's a very narrow window of compatibility. If you have a large, complex, heterogenous environment, then it really pays to have an experienced solution provider asess your environment. (semi-plug) I sysadmin for a small san solution company. Email me with a description of your environment. I'll sit down with our engineers and knock heads. The market and sales droids won't see it. I'm not disclosing the name of the company and I do not speak for them.
  • Just happened to stumble uponthis [ebay.com]. Maybe I'll not be denied after all!
  • Forgot the other caveat: Beware utiliztion creep! Some figures place effective disk utilization at 35%. Check out vitualization products. They can allow you to slice/dice/julianne that disk to any OS, device, environmet. It can make the IT manager a savior because they effective double the storage capacity of that huge RAID box you just paid $Million for.
  • I tried an Ask /., but alas, I was rejected. Please help!

    I'd like to take some old hard drives I have and save all the data on them (rawread?) including MBR etc. I'd like to be able to recover files later, possibly on a different drive. And I'd like to compress those raw files as much as possible without using straight compression - I don't want to be vulnerable to a single bit corrupting an archive. I plan on burning the compressed files to CDR..
    TIA
  • EMC or raidzone. ive had good experiences with both. netapps do have some problems.
  • In case that wasn't clear enough... I'm looking for two software recommendations, one for something that will read every bit, and one to compress the file it makes.
    sorry :)
  • I spent almost a year trying to put together a plan for a 7TB storage area network that would be able to play nicely with Alpha/Tru64, HP-UX, Sun, Irix, NT & Linux. I also wanted to hook up that massive fiber channel ATL-P3000 DLT tape library into the SAN fabric as well. The eventual goal was direct backups to tape via the SAN fabric.

    We ended up going with five 16 port Brocade Silkworm II switches meshed together. The RAID was Compaq StorageWorks HSZ80 controllers with a mix of their older form factor drives and their new universal drives/chassis.

    All and all I've been happy with Storageworks disks and controllers over the years. They are not the cheapest or the first to market with the cutting edge technology but when they do come to market the stuff just plain works.

    For people who are considering doing tricky SAN topologies in environments where there are more than one operating system and fiber channel host adaptor type I would strongly recommend at least evaluating the Storageworks product line. They really shine when you have lots of different systems that have to play nicely on the switched fabric.

    Building a SAN in a homogenous computing shop is easy. Building one that will interoperate with lots of different systems requires much more work & initial planning.

    If you go with NAS instead of SAN I'll also throw my .02 in as recommending NetApp over most other NAS vendors. Be carefull of scaling and backup issues though.

  • The hype is surely NetApp and EMC these days. For serious work you shouldn't forget looking at what Auspex has to offer, though.

    My company is using two of their 4front NS2000 without a glitch since more than one year. The product was pretty young then, but we experienced zero service failure.

    We only had to change one disk (which is expectable given the number of disks in the filers), with no impact on production and performance at all.

    In fact, we only discovered the disk crashed because Auspex phoned to tell us (heck, they have better supervision than us :-)).

    In our experience, for anything from web servers through mail systems serving around 100,000 busy accounts to Usenet spools even (all running on the same filer), Auspex 4front NS2000 are faster than anything else. And we tested a lot of directly attached hardware RAID arrays and other NAS.

    The only problem with Auspex is their pricelist. They certainly aren't too cheap compared to their competitors (NetApp top of the line models, mainly).
    --
  • I've also found the Compaq SAN equipment to be reliable. I recently built an ESA12000, with two HSG80's and two SANSwitch 16's. It was really quite easy to set it up right out of the box and they have support for several different systems. For 1.7TB, it ain't bad.

  • www.xiotech.com (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    XIOtech has a SAN solutions specifically for a heterogeneous environment (NT, Sun and Linux), has HA, and is easily scaled. http://www.xiotech.com Besides they are scaring the bejezuz out of EMC.
  • Can someone answer me a simple SAN related question?

    One of NAS' greatest strengths is that you can share files and volumes easily between different types of servers - NetApp, for example, provides NFS and SMB, allowing Winders and *nix servers to read and right to the same data.

    Can you even do this with SAN? Is there a "universal file system?"

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