@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
But what you can know is that almost no SAN vendor makes a server on par with a Proliant.
IIRC some HP SANs are or were Proliants. I recall the HP 4300 was basically a Proliant. When we were looking at getting a pair, we were basically told our existing Proliant was at risk of failure and in order to mitigate this risk we needed to effectively replace it with two Proliants, plus some software to keep the two in sync. It's adding redundancy to something that I've never personally had fail.
But like the majority of SMEs, we have no redundancy at the software level. We're running single databases for our ERP system and for our Exchange system, for example. So if the database fails we're down. Having a SAN would just mean the failure occurs across two pieces of hardware instead of one.
Another point to make about redundancy. I am really, really confident about the ability of my Proliants to handle disk failure. I've had quite a few over the years, and am now pretty relaxed about the process. That little red light comes on, I phone HP, a new drive arrives, I pop out the old drive, I pop in the new drive, the lights flash, and I walk away. Completely confident that the array will rebuild. It still makes me nervous, but it's a controlled nervousness. I doubt having a SAN fail is anywhere near as straightforward. My point being that I like simple redundancy, I dislike complex redundancy.
Exactly.
Many HP low end SANs are in fact Proliants. Often setup by DotHill and not by HP.
