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Storage Area Networks

Boy oh boy can these things be complicated. The plethora of options is mind boggling and once you have finally made a choice, it seems like you are reading configuration documentation for eternity. Fiber Channel vs iSCSI, RAID 5 vs RAID 10, 10K vs 15K, 2.5" vs 3.5", Vendor A vs Vendor B vs Vendor C, single vs dual controller, snapshots, replication, deduplication, multipath I/O, NFS, and on and on. I think this may be the most information I have ever crammed on, in such a short period of time.

So the true reason for writing this article, today we purchased an EMC ax4-5i iSCSI SAN array. We are planning to use it for two main functions, 1) Consolidate our disk-to-disk backup storage and, 2) Migrate our locally attached Virtual Machine storage to Shared storage so that we can use Failover and Live Migration functionality with Hyper-V.

We took a long hard look at the continuing cost of adding hard drives to our servers and also the cost of dealing with outages when our VM host server had problems.  This led us to the search for an affordable but scalable entry-level SAN solution. EMC was able to provide us exactly that, for just under $5k with 5TB of physical disk space (2-3TB after RAID).

And with that, comes weeks of configuration and installation. All while we are piloting out a new Sharepoint 2010 implementation, working on an IT consolidation project for a sister company, and planning a migration to Exchange 2010. Should be an exciting quarter - that is, if business picks up...