Hitachi 9570V or Storagetek D240?
 

I've been put in charge of evaluating the above mentioned system
proposed by vendors for our SAN implementation and is undecided
between the 2 System.

The Hitachi 9570V specifications are very impressive, 32 TB Maximum
raw capacity with Maximum Cache of 4 GB. The HDS system has 4 FC host
port and 4 FC/AL for connection to additional enclosure and i have no
doubt with Hitachi's hardware performance at this point. I was offered
a 1.1 TB raw storage and 1 GB cache for each DP600 FC controller to
start with. On the software side, Hitachi does not include Snapshot
feature with Storagetek offered with their SANtricity software. And
from my point of view, their UI is not as user friendly as that of
SANtricity's. However, one good thing is that they've offered
Preemptive maintenance with their Hi-Track program which is included
in the deal. Hi-track Dials back to HDS for the system monitoring
everyday and initials Preventive maintenance on the system.

Storagetek offered me the D220 from the start and upon knowing HDS
offers the 9570V, they came back with a quote on D240 with 1 TB raw
storage and 1 GB cache for each storage controller(LSI's 2882).
4X2Gbps host side FC port and 2 FC/AL for drive expansion. Hardware
wise, there's nothing flattering as compared to the HDS systems. They
refused to share with me their controller architecture but on surfing
the LSI's mainpage, i've found that their architecture has nothing to
boast about. It's the same design that all over vendors had been
pursueing for the past decade. It's tried and tested but they might
have system bottleneck once capacity reaches the bounds of 10+ TB. The
architecture describes that hosts connected to FC hubs connects to a
pair of Controller side FC interface chip which no numbers have been
published. HDS openly publishes their system bandwidth of 4.5 GB/s.
However, after searching high and low for Storagetek's numbers, i've
only managed to find that IBM's FastT700 which is OEMed from LSI with
a higher end controller model, 4884, is only running at 2GB/s from the
Evaluator Group report. Storagetek's Software package deal however
includes Multipath/IO and Internal snapshot program which i would have
to purchase separately from the HDS deal.

I'm not also not comfortable with Storagetek's presence in my country
as they are only a 30 man company compared with HDS presence in this
part of the world. I'm also worried that Hitachi might charge of
premium for subsequent year maintenance for the system and future
storage addition. Hitachi offered a 1 year only program for their
Hi-track service and a 1 year hardware warranty whereas Storagetek has
their standard 3 year warranty. Price are very competitive between the
2 vendors with around USD$250 between the 2 vendors(Storagetek the has
the lower bid.

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you guys out there can offer
me your opinion on this 2 systems.

"kschee" wrote in message
m...
I've been put in charge of evaluating the above mentioned system
proposed by vendors for our SAN implementation and is undecided
between the 2 System.

The Hitachi 9570V specifications are very impressive, 32 TB Maximum
.................

Storagetek offered me the D220 from the start and upon knowing HDS
offers the 9570V, they came back with a quote on D240 with 1 TB raw
storage and 1 GB cache for each storage controller(LSI's 2882).
.............................

Thank you for reading this post. I hope you guys out there can offer
me your opinion on this 2 systems.

Both systems are fine, but it would really help if you tell what you intend
to use them for. Having snapshot is great, but if you're not going to use it
then it's not a gating factor. Will the system hold databases or video
streams? Big difference... Tell us what you are planning to do with the
system, maybe we can help you better.

Money-wise, 250$ difference is no difference at all. You probably need a
consultant to set some of this up, the difference is equal to offering him a
coffee break..

Rob

Both systems are fine, but it would really help if you tell what you intend
to use them for. Having snapshot is great, but if you're not going to use it
then it's not a gating factor. Will the system hold databases or video
streams? Big difference... Tell us what you are planning to do with the
system, maybe we can help you better.

Money-wise, 250$ difference is no difference at all. You probably need a
consultant to set some of this up, the difference is equal to offering him a
coffee break..

Rob

Rob , thank you for your reply. We intend to consolidate every of our
data storage requirement into this box. Email (exchange databases),
NAS head attaching to it for File level access, microscope pictures
which are large(typically 100MB-1GB) for analysis research on Nano
materials etc. Pictures had been estimated to grow to 4TB.

We are planning to use Sharepoint portal to provide interface
consolidation with all applications.(Sharepoint uses MS-SQL). Exchange
2003 clusters and Windows Storage Server 2003(WSS2003) clusters are
also in the pipeline. WSS2003 has Volume shadow copy service
(providing 255 snapshots). I preferred this as users will do their own
retrieval of versions of that file directly without administrator's
intervention to mount the backup volume. The box is not expected to
reach anywhere in 10+ TB for the next 2 years. This is a pure windows
shop but we don't rule out any other platform in the future.

Anyone had problems with LSI's SANshare with Microsoft's clusters?
Anyone ran Exchange 2003 on active-active cluster(each running
separate Information store on the LSI ware? Anyone had experiences
with HDS and MS's Clusters that can offer insights that i should look
out for?

I'm trying to do a ROI period stretching to 4 years. Upgrading of FC
controller are out of the question in the 4 year period. As the system
has to pay for itself in this 4 year period.

Your feedback is very much appreciated.