What Makes A Good SAN?

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?

Comments

Man, I hate to sound like a shill but...

[human bean]

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.