Re: when to nas or san

On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 08:53:05 +0100, m0rk <no@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>In article <0jpsh15cmj6heaspbj1dsbjmnqt0r64p35@xxxxxxx>,
>mr_castalot@xxxxxxxxx says...
>> On Wed, 7 Sep 2005 00:40:51 +0100, m0rk <no@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> >We have a wan of w2k servers, several locations, all varying degrees of
>> >storage on HP servers ... the main HQ currently have a 1TB array of
>> >disks that has about 100gb free currently ...
>> >
>> >They are looking at a SAN solution to give them somewhere between 10-
>> >16TB for the next few years ...
>> >
>> >Anyone have any good pointers to documents on when to use Nas or a San
>> >solution or the merits, problems differences, etc ... ?
>>
>> Wow, that's an extremely open ended question that will elicit such
>> responses as:
>>
>> 1) depends on the application
>> 2) nas for file access, san for block access
>> 3) nas can do it all
>> 4) san can do it all
>> 5) databases must use san's
>> 6) real databases should use nas
>> 7) good god man, give us some more info than just capacity
>>
>> Personally I go for 7 but hey, that's just me. I have found that
>> people/groups who jump right to "we're looking at SAN as the strategic
>> direction of our company" are generally clueless about storage.
>> They've heard enough about to think that it's "sexy" (or at least as
>> sexy as IT gets) and want in on it.
>>
>> My thoughts are that SAN is a niche technology and that most things
>> can be done very well by NAS. NAS is easier to manage, install,
>> provision, etc. It offers alot of functionality with minimal
>> complexity. That being said....
>> The niche's that I think SAN fills are high end performance, OLTP,
>> certain engineering and scientific simulations and calculations, etc.
>> So the niche is big money. Hence the reason SAN's are so touted by
>> vendors, imo.
>>
>> In any case, you'll get plenty of posts on this one I'm sure.
>>
>> ~F
>>
>
>Yes, it was late .... info suppression sleep kicked in.
>
>Its basically corporate wan of approx 800 desktops (say 300 at hq, the
>rest spread geographically around the uk at various sized offices)
>running a multitude of servers with exchange2k, sql server, a soon to be
>introduced email archiving facility to keep all mail for 7 years in some
>form of sql database. Various file servers ... everything currently
>running w2k apart from a couple of unix sco box's that run a new company
>accounting app.
>
>Theres a push towards some sort of terminal services environment for all
>of the regional/site offices so storage/email, etc can be centralised at
>hq but this has been resisted so far due to the problems surrounding
>connectivity with such as venture as once the links down no work can be
>done kind of thing .... add to that the inability to realise the actual
>amount of bandwidth needed for the desktop on TS to run smoothly ... so
>this may not happen yet but I think it will eventually work its way in
>over the next couple years.
>
>So, they expect to need somewhere between 10TB > 16TB over the next few
>years with some ability to grow should the need arise.
>
>Some form of backup is going to be essential so dormant contracts can be
>archived and moved off site, etc as well as uptime ... if they manage to
>push through terminal services then the whole company is reliant on the
>hq for everything ....
>
>What other sort of info is required .... ? Ive only ever looked at
>storage from a single server point of view, how many disks in the raid
>adg do we need sort of thing ....
>


Given the applications you're describing I would say SAN is the way to
go. Everything is host based in the environment you described so
there's no need for sharing in the traditional sense.

SAN's can easily scale to your capacity demands, and depending on your
performance and availability requirements it can be done fairly
inexpensively. Look outside of traditional SAN arrays from people
like HDS, EMC, and IBM. Nexsan, Pillar Data, LSI Logic, DotHill, etc,
can all provide FC based storage bricks that can scale and be fairly
reliable/available, and for alot less money than the big names. It
sounds to me like you could go that route given the huge network point
of failure....

I hear the Qlogic switches are quite good at the workgroup level as
well. Enterprise class switches are still McData and now Cisco.
Brocade's EC switch is something I would stay away from personally but
their workgroup switches are excellent.

Emulex and Qlogic are both good hba vendors.

~F
.

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