Hi,
I need help with a SAN purchase. We are currently choosing between two
different vendors Dell/EMC and IBM.

Dell/EMC has offered their CX500
We plan to use it with both FC disk and SATA disk

IBM has offered their FastT600(for FCdisk) with FastT100(for SATA
disk).
Basically this looks like it is two separate SANs, one for each disk
type.

Im in favor for the Dell/EMC solution since we have only Dell servers
and Im very pleased with their support so far.
My boss seems in favor for the IBM solution (since the IBM reseller
offer is so well written and understandable to him...)
Non of us have any prior experience with SAN.

Does anybody have any input/experience/comparison with eiter these
two? And could you please help me figure out which solution might be
the best?

Our intended initial configuration is with 3 attached servers; File
server, MSSQL server, Exchange 2003 server. We have a couple of RedHat
Linux servers wich we will attach later on. We have a total of about
25 servers. Half Windows half Linux.

Im very grateful for any input on this.

Cheers

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Dell by their own admission only offers SAN disk solutions that consolidate
disk space but do little for LUN management and virtualization. I have a lot
of experience with IBM FasT RAID and have been impressed with what I see -
the performance is decent and the software management is not bad. I would be
interested to know how IBM intends to migrate aged data to ATA disk - they
would require data migration software. There are some capabilities of TSM to
do file migration but I am not sure of its limitations
My recommendation would be look at using some sort of iSCSI gateway. By
using iSCSI you would not require expensive host bus adapters and you would
avoid the proprietary nature of FCP SANs. iSCSI initiators are free and
allow you to present a block device to the application server over your
existing IP infrastructure.
"BlacKsidE" <blackside@blackside.org> wrote in message
news:57fee1e2.0409301011.30fef3d0@posting.google.com...
> Hi,
> I need help with a SAN purchase. We are currently choosing between two
> different vendors Dell/EMC and IBM.
>
> Dell/EMC has offered their CX500
> We plan to use it with both FC disk and SATA disk
>
> IBM has offered their FastT600(for FCdisk) with FastT100(for SATA
> disk).
> Basically this looks like it is two separate SANs, one for each disk
> type.
>
> Im in favor for the Dell/EMC solution since we have only Dell servers
> and Im very pleased with their support so far.
> My boss seems in favor for the IBM solution (since the IBM reseller
> offer is so well written and understandable to him...)
> Non of us have any prior experience with SAN.
>
> Does anybody have any input/experience/comparison with eiter these
> two? And could you please help me figure out which solution might be
> the best?
>
> Our intended initial configuration is with 3 attached servers; File
> server, MSSQL server, Exchange 2003 server. We have a couple of RedHat
> Linux servers wich we will attach later on. We have a total of about
> 25 servers. Half Windows half Linux.
>
> Im very grateful for any input on this.
>
> Cheers

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]