SANs in the Enterprise?
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ZFS NAS appliance + 3 hosts in front. Next version will be mirrored local storage.
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I would recommend looking at what StarWind Virtual SAN can do for you. This is a Windows native software that can be installed directly to the host and does not need to be an appliance, but still can be inside a VM if needed. Also with our software you can build a 2 node HyperConverged cluster (Windows/VMware/Xen) with highly available storage pull that supports SMB-direct and iSER. You can also take a look at HP VSA.
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We use PURE storage for 90% of our VMs and Dell Compellent for cheap and deep and the rest. I believe we are on the SC9000, but I would actually have to look. Needless to say, it's got lots of storage, and we got lots of them.
Currently sitting on ~6000VMs throughout all our datacenters. Not counting the 200+ we have internal to us.
https://www.purestorage.com/products/flash-array-m/m10.html
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/storage-sc9000/pd -
If you need a separate SAN than Nimble https://www.nimblestorage.com/technology-products/ is a good choice but it depends on deployment size. Directly attached storage is usually much faster because of lower latency. That is why we tend to use virtual SAN instead of traditional SAN for quite a while already. We are using VMware VSAN http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san.html for our ESX cluster and StarWind VSAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san for Hyper-V. Both are very good, however, we are going to replace VMware VSAN with StarWind too because of better performance and RDMA/iSER support.
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Only appliance SANs I would consider are the enterprise players: EMC, HPE 3PAR, HDS and Nimble. I worked for IBM and know that they don't trust their own gear, I don't know if their SANs fall into that category but I generally avoid IBM because I know how little they think of it themselves. If they don't eat their own dogfood you shouldn't either. But IBM is generally considered to be a player here. Outside of those, I would never consider anything less for a production SAN that is an appliance.
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Pure is a niche player and good, but less general purpose. For the right workload, they are very good.
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Former EqualLogic customer quite happy with Nimble the past couple of years...
It functions as storage for vSphere 5.5 and Essentials clusters plus virtualized storage for a few physical servers.
