How good is an EMC SAN?

I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and
quality?

On 24 Apr 2007 08:33:38 -0700, MQCarpenter
wrote:

I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and
quality?

In my experience their reputation is pretty bad except for the DMX
line. In my reading and tests the DMX is pretty damn rock solid so
you probably would not go wrong with that. Others in the DMX class
are the HDS/HP/Sun Tagmastor/XP12k/9980 series (all from Hitachi mind
you, not HDS).
You might put the IBM Shark in that class but I don't know much about
it.

For mid-range SAN I would be looking elsewhere like Sun's STK modular,
HP EVA, or HDS' AMS line.

EMC has a bad reputation in their business practices, their support
(though that is very polarized; you either love them or hate them) and
many of their mid and lower end products.

If you're not doing FC I have to assume you're looking at iSCSI. If
that is the case there are several iSCSI vendors out there that are on
the cutting edge in feature but not necessarily in price. NetApp
would likely be your most expensive iSCSI option but has the most
features.
There are many more out there and I would recommend continuing to look
before settling on EMC.

~F

In Faeandar writes:

On 24 Apr 2007 08:33:38 -0700, MQCarpenter
wrote:

I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and
quality?

In my experience their reputation is pretty bad except for the DMX
line. In my reading and tests the DMX is pretty damn rock solid so
you probably would not go wrong with that. Others in the DMX class
are the HDS/HP/Sun Tagmastor/XP12k/9980 series (all from Hitachi mind
you, not HDS).
You might put the IBM Shark in that class but I don't know much about
it.

For mid-range SAN I would be looking elsewhere like Sun's STK modular,
HP EVA, or HDS' AMS line.

EMC has a bad reputation in their business practices, their support
(though that is very polarized; you either love them or hate them) and
many of their mid and lower end products.

If you're not doing FC I have to assume you're looking at iSCSI. If
that is the case there are several iSCSI vendors out there that are on
the cutting edge in feature but not necessarily in price. NetApp
would likely be your most expensive iSCSI option but has the most
features.
There are many more out there and I would recommend continuing to look
before settling on EMC.

Faeandar is correct with respect to the comment that there are other
vendors to use as comparison with the CX300 class.

However, the service is not as bad as he states.

I manage a CX700 and problems are few and far between. When there
are problems, EMC is at your door often before you even knew the
problem existed due to the CX phone home capability. Field engineers
are very competent and any issues they cannot handle are quickly
escalated to high level engineering support. Generally, any cases
you submit are always followed up by the engineers to ensure that
the problem is resolved swiftly.

The CX is more expensive, but remember that you do get what you
pay for. When configured correctly, the CX is very redundant.
The EMC SAN I have has never failed to provide service. Almost
all upgrades (hardware and software) can be done on-the-fly without
any loss of service.

Just make sure that you consider all of the costs before making any
decision. If you are looking at EMC, ask about Powerpath licensing.
Powerpath is required to take full advantage of redundant paths
and load-balancing.

MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and
quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that anyone
can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in a
good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion and
HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes unavailable,
the server can switch to the other port. This also applies to iSCSI
(with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third party multipathing
software, the native multipathing software of your OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated, and
look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you configure
will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots, all disks
will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of the box. Add
physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o capacity for
every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact a
Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.

Dirk Munk wrote in
:

MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support,
and quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that
anyone can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in
a good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion
and HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes
unavailable, the server can switch to the other port. This also
applies to iSCSI (with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third
party multipathing software, the native multipathing software of your
OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated,
and look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you
configure will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots,
all disks will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of
the box. Add physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o
capacity for every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact
a Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.


Very nice commercial, now back to our regular show...

Wilfred Pickles wrote:
Dirk Munk wrote in
:

MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support,
and quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that
anyone can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in
a good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion
and HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes
unavailable, the server can switch to the other port. This also
applies to iSCSI (with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third
party multipathing software, the native multipathing software of your
OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated,
and look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you
configure will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots,
all disks will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of
the box. Add physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o
capacity for every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact
a Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.


Very nice commercial, now back to our regular show...

No, not a commercial. Hands on experience with all products mentioned. I
don't work for HP, and I don't sell their products. I have no reason
what so ever to make things look better than they are.

But your reaction reaction is typical. Managers in my company thought I
was exaggerating until I showed them it was real. A couple of weeks ago
I got a new EVA (with iSCSI option). It took me about half a day to set
it up (incl. setting up de Windows management server), without
assistence of a HP engineer. Then the project manager gave me a list
with about 4 host and 20 luns, and within 15 minutes I had them configured.

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:25 GMT, Wilfred Pickles
wrote:

Dirk Munk wrote in
:

MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support,
and quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that
anyone can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in
a good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion
and HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes
unavailable, the server can switch to the other port. This also
applies to iSCSI (with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third
party multipathing software, the native multipathing software of your
OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated,
and look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you
configure will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots,
all disks will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of
the box. Add physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o
capacity for every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact
a Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.


Very nice commercial, now back to our regular show...

Actually, I would agree with him on every point except the
performance. We've not seen stellar performance out of our EVA's.
And by not stellar I mean notably less than the STK 6xxx series.

And hotspots can definitely occur. When you've got, for example, 8
lun's striped across the same drives you can bet there will be spindle
contention on each of those drives due to differing lun access. Seen
it, lived it. Just a fact of life with virtualization. Makes it
simpler, not faster.

~F

On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 05:59:38 +0200, Dirk Munk wrote:

Wilfred Pickles wrote:
Dirk Munk wrote in
:

MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support,
and quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that
anyone can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in
a good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion
and HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes
unavailable, the server can switch to the other port. This also
applies to iSCSI (with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third
party multipathing software, the native multipathing software of your
OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated,
and look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you
configure will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots,
all disks will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of
the box. Add physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o
capacity for every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact
a Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.


Very nice commercial, now back to our regular show...

No, not a commercial. Hands on experience with all products mentioned. I
don't work for HP, and I don't sell their products. I have no reason
what so ever to make things look better than they are.

But your reaction reaction is typical. Managers in my company thought I
was exaggerating until I showed them it was real. A couple of weeks ago
I got a new EVA (with iSCSI option). It took me about half a day to set
it up (incl. setting up de Windows management server), without
assistence of a HP engineer. Then the project manager gave me a list
with about 4 host and 20 luns, and within 15 minutes I had them configured.

From a pure ease of use and rich tool set I bet on NetApp for iSCSI.
EVA's are simple, but so are filers. And their tool set just can't be
beat.

~F

Hi everyone...

Dirk Munk wrote:
Wilfred Pickles wrote:

Very nice commercial, now back to our regular show...

No, not a commercial. Hands on experience with all products mentioned. I
don't work for HP, and I don't sell their products. I have no reason
what so ever to make things look better than they are.

I work with IBM, EMC, HP and occasionally with some other vendors, and
those fairy tales about EVA's "user friendly" interface and some other
things are more funny than anything else.

There's really no big difference between using any of those arrays (EVA,
CX, DS4xxx). Anyone who has ever used or configured any storage array
can create arrays, LUN, storage groups (partitions) and other basic
things without looking even in the manual.

Some technical details maybe are true, but I'm not sure that all EVAs
can work in active / active mode.
BTW, CX can, with PowerPath, use all paths for data transfer, but only
one at the same time.

But your reaction reaction is typical. Managers in my company thought I
was exaggerating until I showed them it was real. A couple of weeks ago
I got a new EVA (with iSCSI option). It took me about half a day to set
it up (incl. setting up de Windows management server), without
assistence of a HP engineer. Then the project manager gave me a list
with about 4 host and 20 luns, and within 15 minutes I had them configured.

The same thing any specialist can do on any CX or DS4xxx. That is really
not a problem.

Best regards,

Iggy

On Apr 25, 2:49 pm, Dirk Munk wrote:
MQCarpenter wrote:
I am exploring SAN options at the office and keep reading that EMC is
the best. I am not doing FC, but am looking at a CX300i. How good is
this product compared to the cheaper HP, Lefthand, and other options?
Is their reputation worth the extra cost for maintenance, support, and
quality?

I would go for the HP EVA, and for several reasons.

First of all the management aspect. It is so simple to use, that anyone
can learn it in half an hour or less.

You can get an iSCSI option as extra (FC and iSCSI combined) , or use
the whole box as an iSCSI storage box.

You can use active multipathing with the EVA, none of the competitors
can do that. If your servers have two FC HBAs (as they should have in a
good setup) you can use both FC ports at the same time. EMC Clariion and
HSD 95xx only support failover, so if one FC port becomes unavailable,
the server can switch to the other port. This also applies to iSCSI
(with 2 iSCSI MPX100 routers). No need for third party multipathing
software, the native multipathing software of your OS should be used.

iSCSI host/lun management and FC host/lun management are integrated, and
look the same.

If you have a small or midrange EVA, you will usually put all disks in
one disk group (pool). So let's say you have 50 physical disks in the
box (excl. hot spares), set up as one group. Then any lun you configure
will be spread over those 50 disks. This means no hot spots, all disks
will alway be used to give you the maximum i/o capacity of the box. Add
physical disks to the group, and you will get more i/o capacity for
every lun in that group.

Creating a lun takes seconds, no matter if it is 1GB in size or 2TB.
Deleting it is just as simple.

Don't forget that the Clariion was not designed by EMC, it is in fact a
Data General design.

In my view the HP EVA is one generation ahead compared with the
principles of the Clariion and the HDS 95xx.


Hello MQCarpenter,

are you managing HP EVA. I had a POC some time back and I was also
impressed with these feature like active multipathing, single
diskpool, no dedicated spare disk etc. But I am curious about the
practical performance. How it maintains data on all drives, I mean
over the period of time hotspot may be created. Netapp WAFL maintains
due to serial write anywhere file lay out. So how it does ?
what is your experience about the performance ?

- Raju