Opinons on Dell/EMC CX 500

Hi I am thinking of buying a Dell/EMC CX500 SAN for my orginazation. I was
thinking of installing about 30 servers on it eventually including our
Windows 2003 DC's our Exchange Server, our Document Management System and
several SQL servers and I was wondering if anyone had any opinions on the CX
500 and whether it would be up to the job? Also what is Dells support like?

Thanks in advance

"Andrew" wrote in
:
Hi I am thinking of buying a Dell/EMC CX500 SAN for my orginazation. I
was thinking of installing about 30 servers on it eventually including
our Windows 2003 DC's our Exchange Server, our Document Management
System and several SQL servers and I was wondering if anyone had any
opinions on the CX 500 and whether it would be up to the job? Also
what is Dells support like?

We have several CX600s which are quite nice little boxes. I expect the 500
and 700 would be too, since they're just minor upgrades from the 400 and
600.

For such a small setup, don't let them sucker you into buying ECC, though.
It has yet to prove it's worth to me, even in a datacenter-grade setup
(except for the fact that it's the only way to manage our symmetrix arrays,
besides using the CLI).

I can't say anything about Dells support, since we are supported from EMC
directly.

--
/Jesper Monsted

Thanks Jesper was thinking about buying a NetApp box instead as all my
intial data will be file data but the enhanced options I would have in the
future with a SAN in terms of consolidating my servers made me look at the
whole thing again. How hard do you find your SAN to run and setup? I have no
exposure to fibre channel and SAN's. I think I pretty much understand the
concepts and would look to build my SAN very slowly only adding one server
at a time, but I am still worried about the complexity. The Dell/EMC guys
were telling me that the CX 500 was all GUI based and drag and drop, so is
this the case are they really that easy to manage or do people still have
problems with SANs? From my point of view a NAS box would be the simplist
option as I already understand Ethernet. Any advice on the pitfalls of
setting up and buying my first SAN would be appreciated. Thanks again Jesper


"Jesper Monsted" wrote in message
4.163...
"Andrew" wrote in
:
Hi I am thinking of buying a Dell/EMC CX500 SAN for my orginazation. I
was thinking of installing about 30 servers on it eventually including
our Windows 2003 DC's our Exchange Server, our Document Management
System and several SQL servers and I was wondering if anyone had any
opinions on the CX 500 and whether it would be up to the job? Also
what is Dells support like?

We have several CX600s which are quite nice little boxes. I expect the 500
and 700 would be too, since they're just minor upgrades from the 400 and
600.

For such a small setup, don't let them sucker you into buying ECC, though.
It has yet to prove it's worth to me, even in a datacenter-grade setup
(except for the fact that it's the only way to manage our symmetrix
arrays,
besides using the CLI).

I can't say anything about Dells support, since we are supported from EMC
directly.

--
/Jesper Monsted