Looking to Buy a SAN
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This sounds like unscrupulous sales people having a field day, honestly. We don't know much about your environment and what you are supporting, but VMware + SAN... this seems crazy. Super high cost on one hand that only has benefits in crazy high end production, and then SAN (and looking at non-production SAN) tied to it so it wouldn't really even classify as a production environment. This is a huge mismatch in apparent goals.
We can only armchair advise so far. But our guess is that someone forgot to look at the goals, went to sales people with a budget rather than requirements, and are getting sold whatever generates the highest margins and no one person has been overseeing the project end to end to verify that it's meeting some business goal for the customer. Just guessing, but that's normally how companies end up in this situation - especially with half the purchase complete and not designed to work with what the other half would need to be.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
The HPE engineer we talked said that's not really the case with them anymore, and they are designed much better these days to handle fault issues.
Aside from that we already have bought 5 new hosts (1U hosts with just SD cards for VMware)
Sadly, this was the cart before horse. If you don't "know" how these hosts are going to connect to their storage, how do you "know" you have the right hosts?
Exactly, that's what I was just writing up. Who bought those five servers without knowing what their storage would be? How did they spec them?
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
You should never go to a sales person to ask if their product is any good, in doing so you have given him social permission to lie to you because you can't claim that you didn't know that his job was to promote the product and to be totally biased against your interests.
This is a point that there are near countless threads here and elsewhere that you should read - and have your management read.
It's interesting how people just don't consider the 'job' of a sales person. They have one job - to sell you the product THEY sell, if they do anything else, then they are cheating their own company, and likely shouldn't work there.
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Here's the catch, let's assume you can't return those 5 servers, you might still be able to get a system that's WAY better than any SAN based solution and save money doing it compared to buying the SAN and using these 5 servers.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
They have one job - to sell you the product THEY sell, if they do anything else, then they are cheating their own company, and likely shouldn't work there.
Right, people often think that "well they'll be honest with me." But they are being honest, they tell you up front where they work and their role. So you know that they are there to sell you something that you wouldn't choose if they didn't talk you into it. They are paid to promote their own product, it would be dishonest to everyone involved if they gave out free, high cost engineering advice that their employer hired them to hide.
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I'm open to options. We have 200vms supporting various roles. Should we look into something like proxmox instead of VMware? I've toyed with it but was told it's not serious for business use and has security issues.
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CDW (which we paid as a consultant, not using their sales department) recommended us to go with a Nimble SAN for the dedup and compression.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm open to options. We have 200vms supporting various roles. Should we look into something like proxmox instead of VMware? I've toyed with it but was told it's not serious for business use and has security issues.
LOL, I see it as a bit more serious than VMware. VMware, while not bad, is primarily there to be something to sell via sales people. It's risky and complicated and its good features are only available at extremely high cost and not in your kind of scenario.
Proxmox is very good, and fine for any production environment. But if you are wary of the vendor, and I totally get that as I have my reservations too, then vendors like Fedora and Ubuntu are great if you just want a straight hypervisor, or someone like Scale if you want an appliance that is managed end to end for you.
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So - @ScottyBoy
Do you want assistance engineering a real solution for the business case? or
Do you just want a SAN because that's what someone at the company has already signed off on?If option 1 - please tell us the goals of this project,
if option 2 - frankly, almost anything your sales guy is pitching is likely going to function for a time, until it doesn't. Assuming you get three years out of it, you'll likely be off the hook for any issues that arise at the point. -
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
CDW (which we paid as a consultant, not using their sales department) recommended us to go with a Nimble SAN for the dedup and compression.
CDW are sales people, period. That's what they are. They are never your advisors. You can pay them, but that doesn't change that they are the vendor reps and are your "enemy".
Sadly, it is an ethical violation for them to take your money, but they will do so happily. But they are ALSO paid by the vendors to screw you, and do so, every time.
https://smbitjournal.com/2016/06/buyers-and-sellers-agents-in-it/
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
if option 2 - frankly, almost anything your sales guy is pitching is likely going to function for a time, until it doesn't. Assuming you get three years out of it, you'll likely be off the hook for any issues that arise at the point.
And might work "fine" for a long time... but from day one will...
- Cost too much
- Be too slow
- Take extra work (that they'll convince you to hire them to do)
- Put YOU, not them, at risk
- Not be designed around the future needs that your business might face
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
So - @ScottyBoy
Do you want assistance engineering a real solution for the business case? or
Do you just want a SAN because that's what someone at the company has already signed off on?Yeah, this is important. Because we can have a long (and hopefully super valuable) thread that breaks down how to look at business goals, find the needs, how to look at products and architecture, how to avoid predatory vendors, what technologies and designs will meet whatever the business goals are, etc. But if you are not in a position to leverage all of that, it might just be stressful and unwanted.
If you really just have to buy a SAN, then we should stop looking at the big picture, and figure out the "SAN needs" and go from just there.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
CDW (which we paid as a consultant, not using their sales department) recommended us to go with a Nimble SAN for the dedup and compression.
CDW are sales people, period. That's what they are. They are never your advisors. You can pay them, but that doesn't change that they are the vendor reps and are your "enemy".
Sadly, it is an ethical violation for them to take your money, but they will do so happily. But they are ALSO paid by the vendors to screw you, and do so, every time.
https://smbitjournal.com/2016/06/buyers-and-sellers-agents-in-it/
Yeah, sadly, I agree with Scott completely. The only way you can really trust consulting is the only thing they sell is consulting. The moment they sell firewalls, servers, software, etc, you can never be sure their recommendations in consulting aren't actually driven by the expectation of sales of the hardware they sell, and the back end money get get from those sales.
You can clearly see that CDW, Insight, etc are all driven by their sales when you get random sales calls based solely on the product on sale that month. They don't care what you need, just want to sell you what will put the most money in their pocket this month. -
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
Yeah, sadly, I agree with Scott completely. The only way you can really trust consulting is the only thing they sell is consulting.
Only time you can CONSIDER trusting them. You still need to audit and verify that they are at least giving reasonable recommendations and taking time to at least try to discover needs, goals, benefits, etc. Even if they only sell consulting, they might easily be trying to just get paid to do nothing. But if they are getting paid to screw you, paying them to pay the people to screw you only guarantees that they are crooks and you'll never know to whom they are loyal, if anyone.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
if option 2 - frankly, almost anything your sales guy is pitching is likely going to function for a time, until it doesn't. Assuming you get three years out of it, you'll likely be off the hook for any issues that arise at the point.
And might work "fine" for a long time... but from day one will...
- Cost too much
- Be too slow
- Take extra work (that they'll convince you to hire them to do)
- Put YOU, not them, at risk
- Not be designed around the future needs that your business might face
Of course, all of these are true, but if the decision to purchase the 5 servers was above @ScottyBoy head, then it's likely that person will be to embarrassed to change at this point, forcing @ScottyBoy to only look at the path he walked in the door with. Now, there of course is always room for that assumption to be wrong, but until @ScottyBoy tells us which way he will go - there really is zero point in even talking anymore.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
You can clearly see that CDW, Insight, etc are all driven by their sales when you get random sales calls based solely on the product on sale that month. They don't care what you need, just want to sell you what will put the most money in their pocket this month.
And it isn't that you can't work with them. I've used CDW, I'll use them again. I work with Insight every day. But never in an advisory capacity, he's my VAR. I use him to handle logistics, supply chain, etc. VARs are important, but also important to never let act as IT. They are "anti-IT".
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I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
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@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
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@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
Each server has 8 10gb nics for the storage network. We have the switches for the storage network already.
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@ScottyBoy said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@Dashrender said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
@DustinB3403 said in Looking to Buy a SAN:
I'm amazed at five servers were purchased but without any thought for storage, was the sales guy afraid to push his luck I mean come on...
I wouldn't say that - they clearly thought about SAN, but not having picked the SAN already, so they would know what host adapters might be required, etc... that is definitely a crazy part.
Each server has 8 10gb nics for the storage network. We have the switches for the storage network already.
So someone decided on the storage technology as well (iSCSI?) before deciding on the SANs? This, too, begs the question... how did they know that they wanted that networking technology (and which one is it) without having known the exact model of SAN that would work best beforehand?
