NAS' & SANs

[kryptor]

Good morning all,

I've come in search of some advice and I'm hoping this will be one of the best place to get it from.

I am looking for a SAN/NAS for a medium sized business (has around 160 PC's split over 3 sites, with virtualized (Hyper-V) servers). I want to use a SAN/NAS with the virtual environment and move away from a close to maxed out RAID setup on this kit. I've been told a SAN would be the better option but obviously this comes with a great cost just for picking up the chassis to host the drives in generally.

I have done some digging around and found a few different manufacturers of NAS' that say they would be compatible with Microsoft's Hyper-V server. I am looking for around 8TB of storage so I can setup a RAID 5+Spare scenario.

The questions I have that I'm looking for some help with are:

1.Which would be better SAN or NAS?
2.Favoured manufacturers of devices? I have seen Synology, QNAP, Netgears, HP, Fujitsu so far and am already aware that some of these are really good companies, but looking for anyone who may have a setup similar to this?
3.Suppliers in the UK with a good pricing - if anyone has any suggestions?

I'm also open to any suggestions that people may have in relation to the setup I'm looking at

Here is a link to one of the QNAP range that I was looking at

Look forward to hearing from anyone who can help.

Thanks,

Dave


If at 1st you don't succeed then I guess your i the right place to ask why!

 

[cajuntank]

Depends on the SAN capabilities you are looking for (deduplication, asynch replication, etc..). I am a big fan of HP equipment myself and use their SAN equipment, but you might be able to do what you need done just using Microsoft's 2012 server as it can act as a SAN target and their new SMB 3.0 can keep up with I/O reads/writes of most drives.

Stay with SAN for virtual environments. Just a quick Google search and this is one of the links that explain just a easy as anything I could say

http://networkattachedstorage.starwindsoftware.com/san-vs-nas-pros-and-cons-and-what-to-choose

Not from the UK, so can't help you there. Just find a reputable reseller/VAR for the manufacturer of your choosing and go from there.

 

[kryptor]

Hi cakuntank, thanks for getting back to me with regards to this.

I am looking into the information on the link you have posted as I type this. Hopefully I can get some ideas then of where to go and what to do.

Regards,
Dave

If at 1st you don't succeed then I guess your i the right place to ask why!