SAN, NAS, Cost and Benefits?

luetin asks: "Our company is at the point where our storage and backup infrastructure is ok, but not for much longer. We are looking into SAN, NAS, and variations thereof. We are a small IT department, with two sysadmins and two programmers. Right now we have stored/circulating about 2TB of data, and that's going to increase steadily in coming years. Does Slashdot have experience setting up SANs? Tales of costs and benefits of SANs versus a gaggle of NAS? Can SAN be implemented by reasonably seasoned IT people, or is it too dark an art?"

Comments

I'd go this route

[Sevn]

Used Netapp brand Network Appliances

We used to use Netapps at MindSpring to serve 80,000+ commercial webhosting clients. They are tough as hell, easy to maintain, last forever, and do everything right. You can mount the shares with NFS or CIFS. It has a web based interface for configuration, or a simple command line interface. You can add drives and change volume sizes, inodes, etc without shutting it off or losing a connection to it. The snapshot feature will eventually save your butt like it saved mine on many occasions. Hope this helps.

Small SAN vs Big Money

[yancey]

You're on the extremely low end of where a SAN becomes practical... and it may not be practical in your environment. If the SAN is really going to stretch your budget thin, don't do it!

Xiotech's products are very easy to use, but costly. You'd be lucky if you could get the whole setup for under 80,000 USD. The SAN hardware itself is reasonably priced, but you pay a license to use 1-8 servers, you pay more for 9-16, and so on. The software part gets expensive quick. Also, be aware that Xiotech charges about three times the off-the-shelf price for drives and they won't let you use off-the-shelf drives or you void your warranty and get no support. They certainly make their money on the drives.

HP/Compaq has the EVA series of disk arrays that use very similar "virtual array" technology that Xiotech uses. Again, very flexible, but expensive. At least HP doesn't make you pay more to connect more servers and the charges for drives is a little more reasonable.

It certainly seems that someone along the way forgot that RAID means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The whole point is to make a bunch of relatively unreliable disks into a very reliable whole, unless you just want speed and don't need the reliability.

If you're thinking about a two or three server cluster and just need shared storage where you can add more drives, you might look at some of the small and inexpensive rackmount IDE RAID solutions that are available with Fibre Channel and a FC hub, but be sure to get references and see who's using the things and what their experience has been. You can get two terabytes for under 15,000, but some of these are good yet inexpensive and some of them are just cheap junk.

These IDE RAID solutions do not provide the advanced features of a virtualized SAN, like changing RAID types on the fly (from RAID 5 to RAID 10, for example). However, you could easily spend 60,000+ on a Xiotech SAN or you could spend the same amount and have eight terabytes in four IDE RAID modules. Your choice, but for a small shop, I say get the eight terabytes and setup mirroring across two of these RAID boxes.