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

See what you can do about getting OTS solutions

[Dancin_Santa]

Don't waste your time doing this kind of thing yourself. The final storage system will end up being cheaper and likely more robust if you go with an off the shelf solution.

Companies specialize in building these types of systems all the time. Hire one of them to help you set up. If you have that much data and expect it to grow at a faster rate into the future, don't bet on your own rinky dink implementation, get a professional.

Re:You left out a few important things...

[Zapman]

These are all very important questions. The other thing that people forget about is the service agreement.

My company paid too much money for an EMC array. We don't need the performance, and we don't need all the wizbang features.

That doesn't mean it sucks though. EMC calls us within 5 minutes of any hardware issues on the box. It's fault tollerant to a amazing degree. The only time we've taken downtime was when we needed to schedule a major firmware update. The support agreement is amazing. If something dies, they call us and say 'we can be on site with an engineer and the part in 2 hours. When do YOU want us to show up?'

Asside from our database servers, none of the boxes we've put on EMC come close to pushing the throughput limits. We would have been much wiser to utilize NAS for most of the servers. Much cheeper, good reliability, reasonable performance, and they can talk all the major file sharing protocols: SMB, CIFS, NFS, etc, and we could have spent less on the SAN.

A poster above suggested a mix of either building the SATA arrays yourself, or a small vender. I poked on their website, and their support agreement says 'parts next day'. If the driveplane blows out, 'next day' may or may not be good enough. People scream really loudly if email is down.

The other thing is making sure you find someone who can reverse engineer your 'rsync' solution. This is one reason companies tend to prefer out of the box apps for system level stuff. They can send someone to training for it.

Ho man you this always hit a nerve with me.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

Do not, I repeat do not go with a cheap ass no one supports you solution of white boxes with IDE raids.....Don't FUCKING DO IT!!!

You like your job? You want to keep it? Buy something with 4 hour support gold contract or close to it.

I have done SANS for the last 5 years and when you loose an MS module, or your HBA goes nuts, or your switch drops it's config your in a world of hurt if you don't already know how to fix it. GET THE SUPPORT. You suck up on this and loose 4 terra of data, every sql server in your network goes down your screwed.

I don't know how to say this any stronger...NO NO NO NO....do not go cheap on this. Do not listen to people taht say something cheap will work...Do not, not get the support contract. If you don't the unforgivable will happen, Murphy will come down and take a giant shit right on top of you.

Does SANS work? IS it worth it...hell yes it is. I have used it in 40 million+ hit a month webfarm back ended by MS SQL, I have used it with Oracle, I have used it with AIX and it improved everything everywhere. With everything from MS clusters, to crappy little Novell file feeders. IT is wonderful...when it is working. It works 99.9% of the time but when it goes it goes big, and if you can't fix it.. your standing there holding the bag for all you data. Keep in mind you have moved it all to a single point of failure....now are you really going to trust that to some Rube Goldberg POS some linux zeolots told you would work just as well?

Go buy a big name if your pushing around that much data and buy a contract. Ask you boss if that data vanished overnight if it would be and issue. Think about using super DLT or LTO 10+ tape drives to back it up on the fiber switch to reduces you backup time. Think about snap shot technology that basically does a slice to slice copy then backs up offline. Think about near line storage. These are the things you think about when you get this deep into it. Money will always be an object, ask them to put a price on the data...how much is it realy worth? Then move forward to protect it as if you where holding cash.

----wow end rant here. Sorry guys, you just don't mess around with crap when you get to the level that you need a SANS. Hobbling together a bunch of crap is the fastest way out the door. You don't believe me? Then you have never put together a real system, with real world money, and real world problems. They don't wait for you to find a driver, or a web page with the solution. They just show you the door.

You Love Your First NAS

[Crypt0pimP]

You hate your Sixth.....