I am in the process of comparing a SAN solution from EMC (CX600) and a NAS solution from Network Appliance.  Does anyone have experience with these vendors and can give me any pros or cons for the two?

I am dealing with TB's of data.  I primarily need scalability, easy system administration (1 1/2 people dedicated) and then performance.

For TB's of Data and ease of administration I would suggest you use an Hitachi 9500 or 9910

If you want to serve data files only and your LAN is up to it, go for the NAS, it will be cheaper and easier to manage. If you are looking to support block based applications such as RDBS or exchange, and/or need performance then maybe a SAN is what you want (though a Netapps NAS will satisfactorily support most so long as you don't want enterprise performance). Both are designed to be scalable. Its a complicated one and you'll need to look at all your business requirements (availability, backups etc).

There is a basic difference between SAN and NAS:

SAN allows you to run executables of the Logical Volumes (i.e. it acts as if it resides as a disk on your servers). NAS is simply a file storage system. With NAS, you will see huge networking issues because it is purely IP traffic routing through your network. If you need massive throughput (usually 100MegaBITS/s [=12.5 MegaBYTES/s] is the limitation of your network)and binary execution, you have to go with the SAN approach. We are using an IBM FastT500 (1 Gigabyte Backplane) and we get an actual end-to-end throughput of 70 MegaBYTES per second). There is a later version FastT700 that has a 2 Gigabyte Backplane and you should be able to get over 100 Megabytes/s out of it...

I like the fact that the SAN can be used for file storage and Executables. The SAN disk price has come down tremendously...

hi,

What brand name SAN and also NAS would you recommend? I now understand the differences but would need afew brand names to compare. As you can tell I'm also in the process of making a rather large purchase although I may opt for a SAN being that my network does incorporate an Exchange box which will eventually become a clustered Active-Passive environment..
Thanks for any feedback and have a good weekend!!

GT

gman,

We ended up comparing Network Appliance (NAS) and EMC (SAN).  Kind of apples to oranges, however, we really needed to narrow it down to what technology met our needs.  The other companies that we were aware of were Hitachi, IBM,  and HP.  We also had resources that had experience with EMC, so that is why we focused on them for the SAN solution.  It looks like EMC will do the job due to the fact that we had a very very large data storage requirement, ablitity to boot off of a LUN and speed of a SAN.  We are also running SQL server and it is recommended that SQL run on a SAN.

Thanks,
K

I'd be interested to know how you managed the decision between EMC and Netapp... is there any material you'd be willing to share, eg technology comparison, review material or decision analysis?

With EMC, you're looking not just at different storage technologies (eg Clariion vs Symmetrix) but different fabric technologies (Brocade/McData/Cisco) and HBAs (JNI/Emulex/etc).

With NetApp, you're looking at network throughput and copying/snapshots/archiving as the unit is more or less a single device (ok, different heads and different redundancy features, for example, but essentially no more than a purpose-built fileserver)...

Thanks,
pgn/11Jul2003
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