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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?"
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.
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.
Zapman