Any forums out there about SAN's ?.

Wolf,

I have to ask the question ... ATA and a good support contract or SCSI and a
lower class of support ... I presume that each could cost as much as the
other (more expensive contract v. extra startup costs of SCSI).

Personnaly I'm still in the SCSI camp, when the business is on the line (and
my neck is as well) I know which I feel safer with.

"Wolf" wrote in message
. ..
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote in message
...

ATA is tier-2 storage. That being said, and since we are on a beer budget,
we
have purchased a lot of ATA storage this last year and a half to be topped
off
with 30TB more by the end of the month. We chew up disk storage like
crazy.
They have more issues than fibre drives but since we have a good support
contract
we have had good results.

We have just purchased and EMC CX700 w/ 30TB of ATA. We have been
testing a CX500 for the last 3 months in our environment and found it fast
and
reliable. We lost one drive early on-not bad for a SAN that lives being
beaten
up 24x7.

--
Wolf
----------------------------------------------------------------
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Apologies flux, I meant you not Wolf, sorry.

"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote in message
...
Wolf,

For the SAN newbie would you care to expand on this ?.

I sense there's been a long running arguement in c.a.s over this

"flux" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Wolf" wrote:

ATA is tier-2 storage. That being said, and since we are on a beer
budget,

Here we go again.

In article ,
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote:

For the SAN newbie would you care to expand on this ?.

I think "tier-2" refers to smaller outfits as opposed to "tier-1"
companies such as EMC and Hitachi. This in a sense implies that "tier-2"
storage is in some way inferior to "tier-1".

Specifically, the higher end products are SCSI and fibre channel, and
the low-end, ATA and now SATA.

Years ago, I would say there was a significant distinction between the
"high-end" drives and the "low-end" But "low-end" drives are much better
and are really no longer "low-end". For example, even the "low-end"
drives used in consumer devices like Tivo and the iPod have decent
throughput and reliability. Tivo is intended to operate 24/7 and iPods
are MP3 players, which are prone to being dropped and tossed around.

Anyway, here is an excellent article about a "beer-budget" SAN:
http://www.nwc.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1519ws1

Thanks flux

I've never heard of the Apple Xserve RAID but I'm glad I now know about it,
for the price it seems damn good. It has most of the redundancy features I'm
after however it doesn't look like the controller of the Xserve has a backup
?.

So for less than £10,000 I could setup a fibre channel SAN

I've got a lot to think about now, need to find out what sort of
warranty/support package Apple can provide ...

"flux" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Fatboy40" no one here, sorry wrote:

For the SAN newbie would you care to expand on this ?.

I think "tier-2" refers to smaller outfits as opposed to "tier-1"
companies such as EMC and Hitachi. This in a sense implies that "tier-2"
storage is in some way inferior to "tier-1".

Specifically, the higher end products are SCSI and fibre channel, and
the low-end, ATA and now SATA.

Years ago, I would say there was a significant distinction between the
"high-end" drives and the "low-end" But "low-end" drives are much better
and are really no longer "low-end". For example, even the "low-end"
drives used in consumer devices like Tivo and the iPod have decent
throughput and reliability. Tivo is intended to operate 24/7 and iPods
are MP3 players, which are prone to being dropped and tossed around.

Anyway, here is an excellent article about a "beer-budget" SAN:
http://www.nwc.com/showitem.jhtml?docid=1519ws1

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 05:11:29 GMT, flux wrote:

In article ,
"Wolf" wrote:

ATA is tier-2 storage. That being said, and since we are on a beer budget,

Here we go again.

Exactly. For the dumb, like this flux, who haven't yet grasped the
fact that "tier-2" doesn't mean "terrible" or anything like it.

The poor little boy doesn't understand that even the fastest ATA drive
is slower than mainstream tier-1 drives, like 73GB 15K beasts.

Malc.

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:21:46 GMT, flux wrote:

[ Snip ]

Years ago, I would say there was a significant distinction between the
"high-end" drives and the "low-end" But "low-end" drives are much better
and are really no longer "low-end". For example, even the "low-end"
drives used in consumer devices like Tivo and the iPod have decent
throughput and reliability. Tivo is intended to operate 24/7 and iPods
are MP3 players, which are prone to being dropped and tossed around.

The silly little boy doesn't understand the difference between the
Toshiba 1.8 inch MK2004GAL drives used in an iPod (3600rpm) and the
drives used in high-end storage (15,000rpm).

Malc.

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:51:15 -0000, "Fatboy40" no one here, sorry
wrote:

I've never heard of the Apple Xserve RAID but I'm glad I now know about it,
for the price it seems damn good. It has most of the redundancy features I'm
after however it doesn't look like the controller of the Xserve has a backup
?.

The company that I'm using to post this tried a few. They sucked.
And Apple has no idea how to support serious operations. Their
response seems to be "reformat/reinit and try again".

Malc.

On paper they seem like a reasonable bit of kit with dual everything (PSU's,
controllers etc.).

I've got to ask, why exactly did they suck, was the hardware prone to fail
or was Apple support just **** poor ?. If they're a pile of crap then surely
Apple must know this, there must be some people out there who are happy with
it ?.

To be honest I really want to go with EMC, specifically the CX300 but's
it'll be really tight to get it into my budget. There's the CX100 but again
we're back to the ATA SCSI debate

"Malcolm Weir" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 11:51:15 -0000, "Fatboy40" no one here, sorry
wrote:

The company that I'm using to post this tried a few. They sucked.
And Apple has no idea how to support serious operations. Their
response seems to be "reformat/reinit and try again".

Malc.

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 09:39:24 -0000, "Fatboy40" no one here, sorry
wrote:

I was wondering if anyone here knows of a forum/bbs where people discuss
SAN's ?. I'm having trouble finding info on this subject, specifically about
EMC hardware.

Thanks.

Clive.


I think this is the perfect forum, and honestly it could use more
traffic so post away....

I didn't catch how large you wanted to make this but unless you're
really tied to EMC or HP there are alot of other array mfg's that make
very good array's. And all that makes a SAN is the switch, so buy
what you can get or what is supported. Brocade, McData, and Cisco fit
just about everyone's support matrix.

~F

In article ,
Malcolm Weir wrote:

The silly little boy doesn't understand the difference between the
Toshiba 1.8 inch MK2004GAL drives used in an iPod (3600rpm) and the
drives used in high-end storage (15,000rpm).

The difference is that Toshiba is like a Timex, takes a licking and
keeps on ticking. Now trying throwing one of these unnamed "high-end
storage" devices on the couch on a regular basis-sometimes while it's
spinning--and seeing how long it lasts.