Choose HP EVA4000 OR IBM DS4700 1

[ggwinjack]

Hi,

My company wants to implement SAN, and I am tring to figure out if we should use HP EVA4000 OR IBM DS4700. I know EVA4000 has VRAID feature, is it useful?

Thanks!

Jack

 

[Breslau]

what kind of hosts will be using this system?

 

[anawrocki]

I asked myself a similar question not that long ago, and ended up with an EMC clarion. I was biased towards EVA as we are mostly and HP shop.

My 2 cents on EVA after researching a SAN for this environment is that HP does not seem to be very committed to the product long term. They seem to be almost a year behind EMC as far as adopting new technology / refreshing the product line. This is unfortunant because there was a time when EVA was positioned to be a strong canidate to to some cutting edge technology.

I can not speak for the IBM DS line as it did not make my top three.

 

[comtec17]

From strickly a pricing and solution view I would use the EVA. I would highly recommend you review the EMC CX3-20 array before you make a decision.

 

[ggwinjack]

Thank you! We are going to use it for MS Exchange 2003,MS SQL and file servers. I was told EVA VRAID is good for the Database, is it correct? We are going to have 2TB and will expand to 4TB soon. Is anybody using IBM DS4700?

 

[Breslau]

well since it looks like you're using winderz boxes, which disk maufacturer won't matter so much as finding one that can perform well in a random hit environment (your mail host).... as opposed to a system that's designed to stream data, as some are.

 

[anawrocki]

Storage virtualization is a new buzz word that sales folks like to throw around these days to sell hardware to non technical people in windowed offices. Every vendor has some sort of "virtual" storage incarnation with a different name. The features leap frog eachother from time time but at the end of the day it is all more or less the same. There are some interesting true storage virtualization technologies out there, but by the sounds of it, probably not in your budget.

At the end of the day EVA will likely meet your needs, but you are buying into an older technology that is already 18 months behind most others before you install it. An EMC Clariion CX3-20 is going to be around a lot longer so you can choke down the price difference. You can even shop Dell against EMC on price for the exact same CX3-20.

If you have it in the budget, I attended a seminar put on by

http://www.evaluatorgroup.com

and found it to be extremely helpful and unbiased.