New SAN help 2

[pinkpanther56]

Hi all

We are a high school with a limited budget but are looking into the possibility of a SAN in the near future. We’ll more than likely be getting a company in to help with this but I would appreciate a few pointers so I can read up a bit on the technology (so we don’t get fleeced basically )

We currently have approx 6 Windows 2003 servers that might become 2008 servers next year. They all have internal storage currently and we are running low on space, our current storage capacity is approx 1Tb and expected to grow so we were looking at a NAS but a few people have told up to start looking into a SAN due to an expected increase in our storage requirements.

So basically what would you recommend? If I said we might have approx £10 – 12000 to spend are we dreaming, should we be looking to spend more or could we spend less on a system that could be expanded (that would be ideal)?

Other questions

1. FC or iSCSI and why?
2. What sort of unit could we get (recommendations)
3. Recommended reading?

Any help is very much appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[pinkpanther56]

I don't anticipate us having more than 8 general servers, we might have a few more Citrix boxes but as the user data will be on other boxes i'm not counting them. The problem we have is ever increasing storage requirements and the internal storage on the servers is filling up (it's a pain to add more). I'd like to seperate the servers and the data really so i can have our DC's, SLQ and web server then we have decision time... a couple of file servers with some kind of disk shelf on each? We currently have approx 1Tb of data accross three servers but this could easily increase to 3Tb over the life of our new servers so it would be nice to have some 2U rack servers that can come and go that attach to our storage, storage that can be increased by adding disks or a bigger unit.

As you say Nick i have some thinking to do.

Thanks.

 

[xsmithyx]

Hi Pink Panther,

In reference to SANEngInCO's reply - I think you'll be suprised at the price of SAN's these days - especially the HDS SMS100..