Comprehensive data protection for all workloads
Post Reply
bbricker
Enthusiast
Posts: 54
Liked: 27 times
Joined: Feb 10, 2012 8:43 pm
Contact:

Thinking of building a SAN...

Post by bbricker »

We are implementing a DR site and I'm looking to do it on the cheap. I've pretty much got everything lined up as far as the facility, power, compute, network, etc., but I have not decided what to do on the storage. We have about 60TB on an EMC VNX 5300 in production and Veeam backs up a portion of that to an older EMC Clariion CX3. I've talked to an EMC reseller that specializes in refurb stuff and they have recommended a trade-in of my old CX3 for a refurb CX4 to match the size of the VNX5300 and also to allow me to run at 4gbit fibre channel (versus 2gbit on the CX3). Even being refurb it's a little over my budget. I'm also not sold on the benefit of SAN-to-SAN replication since I can do it with Veeam or even vSphere's new replication VSA.

That got me to thinking about building something myself and plus I already have probably 40+ TB in vanilla/consumer 7200 SATA drives sitting on a shelf from an old project to get me started. I found this article on Network Computing about DIY SANs and have been checking out the websites for several of the commercial SAN software vendors mentioned. Several caught my attention like SAN Symphony-V, NexentaCore, HP StoreVirtual VSA, and possibly even Windows Storage Server 2012. It's cool that these have high-end SAN features like de-dupe, auto-tiering, SSD caching, etc. I know the REALLY cheap thing to do would be to go with something free like OpenFiler or similar, but I want something commercial that has support and nice features. That is, unless I find they are 10's of thousands of dollars, and then I'll probably just stick with refurb EMC CX4 route.

Has anyone gone down this same path I'm looking at? Thoughts?

thanks,
Ben
dellock6
Veeam Software
Posts: 6137
Liked: 1928 times
Joined: Jul 26, 2009 3:39 pm
Full Name: Luca Dell'Oca
Location: Varese, Italy
Contact:

Re: Thinking of building a SAN...

Post by dellock6 »

Ben, every budget consideration is obviously up to you.
I would like to add my two cents: if you are talking about DR, you need to consider you would have to power up and execute VMs from there in case of a failure at the primary site, so do not design your DR storage too low otherwise you will not have enought IOPs to power up what you need.

Luca.
Luca Dell'Oca
Principal EMEA Cloud Architect @ Veeam Software

@dellock6
https://www.virtualtothecore.com/
vExpert 2011 -> 2022
Veeam VMCE #1
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot], Mildur and 240 guests