XSANs

[martynh]

Anyone have any experience of setting up and using an XSAN?

 

[McBunny]

ah virtual storage

 

[dk]

cheap apple software SAN, sorry no, I have HP, Netapp, EMC and IBM experience but none of the others.

HP are announcing their new MSA2000 this week, nothing to do with this thread but it will excite HP people as its the replacement for one of the most successful SAN products ever, the MSA1000 which is a little past its date now.

 

[KDF]

dont you just hate it when people babble on about their work

 

[dk]

LOL, i was about to go to bed and fell across the launch site of the MSA2000 and am now late going to bed as i am so excited, thats how great my evenings are! I've even logged in to work to email people to be the first to tell them about it lol, I am so f**king sad sometimes!

 

[martynh]

Well there's no chance of using any of the others, it's for a design department running Macs.
Waiting for the quote to come back for all the kit should be interesting...

 

[Daz]

The Apple "SAN" is relativley cheap.. as it's just Xserve RAID and Xsan... Heh.

 

[McBunny]

im going to use datacore for data virtualization its decent stuff

 

[dk]

im going to use datacore for data virtualization its decent stuff

not had any experience of that but theres no substitution for a fiber based hardware SAN from one of the big names, you are paying for years of R&D and specialisation, i'm sure its cheaper, but IMO its more of a NAS than an enterprise SAN.

 

[martynh]

The Apple "SAN" is relativley cheap.. as it's just Xserve RAID and Xsan... Heh.

Yeah XSan is the software as far as I can see, only stuff that isn't Apple kit is the fibre switch.

What sort of redundancy do you need built in? 2 FC switches? 2 Metadata controllers?

Not really used anything like this before normally just backup the raid to tape.