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Which storage systems would allow at least 10 2gbs fibre ports and have
zoning inside the storage system to mask logical volumes from all but their
appropriate target hosts?
QUESTION:I am trying to find a short list of good storage systems that are suitable
for use as shared storage over a SAN for up to 30 servers. I'm budget
driven on this and need to stay under $110K.
One of the key frustrations in reviewing the mid-tier offerings is that the
vendors' data sheets give very poor guidance about which of their product
lines are well suited for such a large number of servers. I know many of
these systems have only a few fibre ports on them, thus bottlenecking on the
disk I/O interfaces. The high end products like Symmetrix and HDS
Lightning have plenty of fibre ports, but software licensing costs alone
exhaust my entire budget.
In looking at options like LSI Logic E4400, I see multiple fibre ports as an
option, but I have no idea whether this could really scale to 30 servers all
accessing the storage simultaneously.
Which storage systems would allow at least 10 2gbs fibre ports and have
zoning inside the storage system to mask logical volumes from all but their
appropriate target hosts?
ANSWER: The first question to ask is does the storage truly get accessed that
much? Many people find that the majority of the load on an app or
server is cpu and memory, not IO. Our Oracle db's are very cpu
intensive and they buy 100's of thousands worth of servers, but only
need 1gb fcal cards (2 for redundancy) and don't even push that.
If you really do need that much IO, then maybe the budget isn't
realistic.
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