Which Storage Solution

[Pedals]

My company wants to consolidate its file servers into one location, which would be the rights solutions NSA or SAN?

There would be approximately 5 server requiring access to the storage and 150 users.


Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[comtec17]

This depends on what is being served up and what the plans for future applications are.

If this is just for file shares, then NAS will be the wise choice as it is cheap and uses your current infrastructure.

 

[mbourne2006]

Howdy

Lots & lots to consider. With files distributed across multiple servers, access and management is complicated but resilience against component failure is quite high. Once you start consolidating, management & access becomes much simpler, but resilience drops. Your choice of solution should be based on factors such as: how long can my business tolerate complete loss of access to the data? If I need to recover, how much data can I afford to lose? How quickly must I be able to get things up and running again? What sort of growth do I want to plan for in the future?

With such a large range of solutions on the market, I'd start with basic business questions first to give myself some edges to what is a rather fuzzy problem.

If resilience is a key concern, then do you need to consider dual-fabric SAN to provide fault-tolerance from HBA through switch to storage? Do you need to think about "FlashCopy"-capable hardware that can create practically instantaneous copies of data with no perceptible interruption to the application?

Here's a link that might give you some more ideas:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/storage/support/disk/index.html

 

[jmd0252]

Since you are looking into consolidation, have you thought about using some sort of virtural solution, such as VmWare or Microsoft? Once you have a large SAN, managing the actual "servers", esp using a virtural solution becomes much easier.

 

[Pedals]

Thanks,

I have decided to go for a NAS solution, due to the costs of introducing a SAN