SAN Decision

After months of research and a month of talks with vendors and manufacturers, l I have made a decision. Drum roll please…… EqualLogic. Our PO was submitted Friday and we are expecting it to be delivered late this week or early next week.

Like I've stated in past posts, this has been a difficult decision but I feel very confident about it. I have ranked the solutions on order of appeal EqualLogic, LeftHand MPC, LeftHand NSM, D-Link and Siafu. The last week, I was only looking at the EqualLogic and MPC solutions and each has their own merits. EqualLogic could be setup by us and has the best internal redundancy and LeftHand has their Campus SAN solution and thin provisioning. I really liked the LeftHand Campus SAN solution, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn't think it was that big of an advantage, as it looked on paper. Any SAN solution, for the foreseeable future, would be installed the main server room, so physical separation for disaster recovery (DR) is not possible for us, this negated part of their advantage. I'd rather have my DR replicate to an offsite data center and both units support this requirement. To make the LeftHand solution redundant in the Campus SAN, we must synchronously replicate data between two units. This requires a 50% storage overhead on top of the RAID overhead inside the units; this never seemed like a storage efficient solution. Lastly, I was worried about supporting the system. Because it was highly recommended that the manufacturer install the solution and train us, I was very concerned about transferring knowledge in the future or someone else supporting it if I was on the other side of the country. EqualLogic on the other hand has multiple controller boards, fan units, hard drives and power supplies within each unit, so the odds of a single unit going down is minimal, and I am comfortable with that. I also was much more comfortable with the support requirements of the EqualLogic solution, so someone could come it behind me and manage the system.

Now it's time to prepare for the installation!

Comments

[Jason Powell]

Congrats on the purchase :-)

[Ed Buford]

Good decision!
You're in good hands with Equallogic.

[Justin Smith]

Congradulations! Welcome to the world of iSCSI SANs.

[Chris K]

Wow, I wish that I had stumbled upon this earlier. Not only was I presented with a similar decision, but I made a decision in the opposite direction.

Lefthand does expect to send out trained engineers for the initial install, but after having expanded to a secondary site, it's really nothing that can't be handled with a quick look at the manuals. Additionally, when we were evaluating the cost options, Lefthand had a lower entry cost, which was more appealing to us. Overall, we feel that we made the right choice for our needs, and it's somewhat disappointing that Lefthand's installation policy soured the deal for you.

Finally, the Campus SAN option takes up no more space than the typical 2-way replication, which I saw as a major strength, as we've been able to perform rolling upgrades during production windows without anyone being the wiser. This may not be a significant issue for everyone, but it certainly sold us.

All that said, on the small-scale implementations, EqualLogic does appear to eat Lefthand's lunch, performance-wise, so as always, it all comes down to what your needs dictate. Welcome to iSCSI!