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Which SAN solutions would you recommend for SMB companies?
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6 Answers
Brielle,
As many of the respondents have already pointed out, a good answer to this question is dependent on an understanding of the needs of the organization in question.
The good news about SAN technology is that there are a wide spectrum of costs and features available, so smaller organizations are not automatically relegated to second-tier options relative to larger organizations.
One less pleasant side effect of all this choice is that it is harder to give an answer merely based on size of the organization or even size of the data to be stored. Max and Robert ask some key questions that must be answered, otherwise the basic answer will be "it depends." :)
EMC and NetApp offer some seriously high-end equipment that will probably be less viable for smaller companies (from a value standpoint). All the major server vendors offer one or more SAN solutions that are very capable, provide decent to excellent management tools and features, and are more affordable that the big boys. And there are some other less known vendors such as Stonefly, Qnap, iQStor and Nexsan, that offer very capable features, decent to good management and excellent pricing for small or large organizations.
Beyond this, there are perhaps a dozen other vendors that offer low-end, get-you-started SAN and NAS solutions that have basic manageability at best. Not bad for an introduction to SANs, but not as likely to effectively grow with your business.
But first, your organization's requirements for storage must be known.
-ASB: http://about.me/Andrew.S.Baker
It really depends on what type of network access they need. In most cases I reccomend iSCSI Dell storage. They are at a good price point and Dell normally offers very attractive lease options that can help an SMB.
An answer to your question hinges on two things:
1. What are you trying to accomplish (what systems will connect and for what reason)?
2. What is your budget?
Connecting a few VMware servers to a SAN would require different connectivity than connecting many servers for shared clustering storage. Those choices would directly affect your budget.
Another issue is" What features do you require the software to provide to you?" A NetApp can provide a full featured hardware/software configuration that may be out of your price range while there are SANs (such as iStor and Dell) that are less expensive and may fit your budget *but* they do not provide the management features that you need.
Due primarily to budget reasons my company went with an iStor and we are very pleased with the hardware and less pleased with the management software which can be called basic at best.
Depends on the amount of data but Nasui has a great solution.
I have had experience with both Sun Blades & SAN, and a few Dell PowerVault MD3000i (iSCSI) with R610 rack servers running VMware vSphere. I prefer the Dell. Running all needed servers as virtual machines reduces costs and effort for disaster recovery, deployment, and upgrades.
Before we can answer a recommended SAN solution for an SMB, we need to ask two questions:
1) What is in their budget?
2) What is their need/goal?
i.e... A SAN solution can be built for as little as a few thousand dollars, and well into the hundreds of thousands. Is it a bank SMB that needs high speed transactions? Is it a insurance office SMB that slower hard drives will fit the need?
My questions would be.
1. What types of files are we talking about?
2. How are the files being used/accessed/shared in your business?
3. Have you considered NAS options?
4. Who told you a SAN was the answer?
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