Nathan B. • Two platforms that come directly to mind for me are the HP 3PAR platform and NetApp both of which offer fairly robust functionality while being relatively easy to manage. I would not call either of these solutions inexpensive but both are competitve when it comes to enterprise functionality and both have good solid companies behind them. You are on the right track with EMC as well and another vendor I would take a look at would be Hitachi with their mid-range line of products. You probably will also hear about Compellent and IBM with XIV. Both are okay and certainly great solutions in certain scenarios but I would personally look first to HP, EMC, or NetApp for general usage.

In my experience the best way to do this is to first come up with your requirements and make sure you include only requirements not just wants. Then put them into a weighted matrix format you can review with your team. Bring the first pass of vendors in to discuss their solutions and using your needs matrix narrow it down to 2 finalists. Be sure that any additional features not included on your needs matrix are evaluated as additional features and recieve much lower weights than what your real needs are as that is how you get oversold. By the way, make sure you share your needs with them but not how they are weighted.

Once you have those two finalists then you need to take a real close look at both and make sure you pick the right one. This is the hard part of the decision but you should be able to get the right solution for you this way. Doing it this way you also eliminate a bunch of "nice to have" features that dive up price and you get both vendors on a very level playing field and should get a great price.

Happy shopping and good luck.

Jeremy C. • Now that I dont work for the customers with a business relationship with them anymore. Do NOT under any conditions go with Isilon, nexsan. Isilon brought our company to its knees, it wasnt able to handle ever changing data its performance was so poor it caused us to switch it all out, our customers were furious. Nexsan was also problematic, we had controllers fail, and not failover the way they should have. We experienced a serious data loss. For the rest, I have to agree with Nathan, for Netapp and HP, you are going to get very reliable solid platforms. For dedupe, in the long run, data domain will be your best bet, it works very very fast, if you back up to it, on the VTL, you will be fine, it does things no one else out there does. You are just missing some regular components in Data domain that you find in netapp, and HP.

Sholom B. • Interesting stuff. I was actually looking into Nexsan, but they didn't feel right. Nathan, I like the process you laid out for narrowing the list of vendors down.

I am also wondering which vendor is good to get in on the ground floor with a good setup that scales nicely. I'm thinking a single piece of hardware to start and then scale from there on out.

Raffy R. • Great write-up Nathan! Based on my years of experience as an infrastructure project manager, the NetApp SAN/NAS Solutions has consistently ranked the best when it came to performance, price point, support, scalability, etc. I am so impressed with the NetApp product and service offerings that I joined the company!

Mark H. • NetApp is nice, but for simplicity, price point, and scalability! I think Equallogic SANs beat most systems hands down. It's just a matter of what are your needs? None of the systems listed so far have the built in capabilities and quick setup times that Equallogic systems do. From box to fully functional 20 minutes tops!

Bryan A. • Depends on the definition of SMB which usually < 500 users and IT storage budget < $50K a bit out of range for 3par and similar offerings especially when including remote replication. Then there is also SMB within the enterprise i.e. remote offices and apps with similar requirements which is the whole reason Dell paid $1.4B in cash for EqualLogic and likewise HP countered by purchasing Lefthand Networks to compete for that SMB space.

Terence S. • Nathan mentioned Compellent in his excellent response as a teir 2 solution but thanks to their recent acquisition by Dell I would bump it up to tier one with NetApp and HP. With Dell signing the checks now the Compellent system will provide all of the advanced features that come with being leaders in the realm of storage virtualization and automated tiering (huge long term TCO benefits) at a more competitive price. Take a look at the way Compellent stacked up against the competition in the last Storage Magazine Quality Award for Mid Market SANs: http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/magazinePrintFriendly/0,296905,sid5_gci1518766,00.html

Jason K. • We have had alot of luck with Exagrid and a Xiotech combination. There products seem to be priced well and will work with any current solution

Ty T. • Since I work for LSI Corp. I am going with LSI. We make storage for IBM, Oracle, Dell, NCR and SGI.

Our products are stable and I believe is the best in its class.

Michael W. • PROMISE Technology, Inc. is a leading supplier of sophisticated RAID storage solutions catering to customers from the enterprise to SMB, as well as SOHO and digital home applications. PROMISE’s award-winning products help solve the business challenges for a new generation of data-intensive business imperatives through a combination of advanced engineering, technical development and industry-leading OEM relationships.


http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_category.aspx?region=en-US&m=156&sub_m=sub_m_3&rsn=2&statistic=VessRAID

Pat F. • This discussion seems to be leaning toward the FC side of the camp, while there are several compelling SMB solutions offered in iSCSI that are scalable, affordable and easy to manage onsite or remotely that can be provisioned on the fly and run synchronously or asynchronously in 10GB. These X86 based solution bundles from HP- used to be LHN, they are not everything for everyone but the offering is very broad and configurable and completely compatible with latest and best virtualization tool sets from VMware and Microsoft. I'd hope you would give us a look if you aren't already hosting a FC only environment.

Michael W. • “As a leading provider of top notch security solutions, Sony is pleased to partner PROMISE Technology in offering to our customers, the iSCSI storage solutions, which are a perfect complement to our comprehensive range of security solutions.”

Yoshikazu Hirano
General Manager of Security Solutions Asia Pacific, SONY

“We are pleased that the VessRAID iSCSI system series qualifies for the VMware Ready™ logo, signifying to customers that it has passed specific VMware testing and interoperability criteria and is ready to run their mission-critical business applications and operations.”

Bernie Mills
Senior Director, Alliance Programs, VMware

Stuart L. • Hi Guys, I'm the Publisher on Storage Magazine and Event Director for the Storage Awards in the UK and as far as SAN is concerned, the companies that do consistently well are: Net App, IBM, HP/LeftHand, Dell/EqualLogic and DataCore. I would have thought, your first point of call would be, a reseller who can advise you best, on options available to you.

Stuart Leigh
Storage Magazine
www.storage-awards.com

Arie S. • I have worked with several vendors.
Basically they all are doing the jobs. i do prefer to try as many as possible.
It's all depending on your perspective:
NETAPP - is very good if you are coming from application point of view. There host integration (snap manager) is the best in the industry. I think it's the choice for "back-office" and "startup" storage

With all the rest you need to be storage personal.

EVA (HP) - have a too few futures. It's very fast, and very easy to use. Can use in "production" environment.
LSI - you can find them on IBM DS4XXX, DEL MD3XXX and other vendors, its ok, but, have some problems coping with power disruption. It's good for "dev, QA".
CLARIION - a bit more complicated to manage. But is the most stable machine I worked with. It's good for "production".
XIV - is very easy to mange, and have very good GUI. His performance is usually very good. But he is not as mature as the other.

Johannes S. • Which storage soltion is the best for SBM? This depends on the requirement of the customer!
1. How big is your storage volume (now and in the next 3 years)
2. What kind of Servers/Devices should be connected
3. What is the main purpose for the SAN infrastructure?
4. Where are the painpoints of the actual infrastructure?
5. Which critical applications are being used?
6. Recovery/backup concept implemented?
7. TCO/ROI analysis - Main focus of saving money or saving downtime (How many hours without storage connection can the ?
8. SAN means: iSCSI, or FC or FCoE? What about virtualization?
9. Available Budget

After answering all these questions, you will find the right vendor for you. NetApp is always nice, but they are not the TRUE SAN vendor (even if they say so). It's more EMC/Dell or HP or IBM which offer true SAN systems and functionality.
Price matters always but also how many costs can you save in the next 3 years (planned and unplanned downtime, administration costs, etc.)
Costs are hig

Marc P. • The easy resopnse would be to recite the Gartner magic Quadrant, but then you might be missing a couple really interesting Vendors.

The key for me in the question is SMB SAN. In the past I've found many SMB's have the same problem $$ dollars vs functionality.

Many of the Teir 1 vendors trade off functionality for entry price point and scale badly. Based on my research, I stand behind solutions that scale well and reduce total cost of growing (which is where a growing SMB needing a SAN should look right?)

Compellent is still the best at this with a single controller for the whole solutions up to the Peta Byte, but they may outprice themselves for SMB, we'll see what Dell does with them. Equallogic also scales well, and has good story to tell. If you buy the NetApp story, you must see DotHill who actually OEM's many of the leading SANS, and has recently come to market under its own brand. You can pick them up much cheaper than NetApp, IBM, HP of similar specs. DotHill also has a good solid unified Storage software they bought from Cloverleaf, (which was developed for the Isreali Military to be bullet proof). Its now called AssuredUVS now by the way

Now for SMB specifically, I would recommend Scale Computing a company that specializes in SMB SAN's built on IBM Hardware and using the solid IBM GPFS as the foundation they built on. Scale Computing has all the enterprise features all included, only comes in a clustered configurations (thumbs up) , all starting at $7,500 MSRP for 3TB raw.

There is no one size fits all solution. Make your criteria and dial in the right fit.

Here are the links if you like for reference:

http://www.scalecomputing.com/http://www.compellent.com/http://www.equallogic.com/http://www.dothill.com/

Tom Valbak A. • Many good points in this discussion and NetApp surely has som prime features.

However I believe that also HDS AMS2000 series would be a solution to investigate... HDS has some top-of-the-line enterprise features and always does extremely well on performance comparisons with other brands.
A bit on the high-end when it comes to price though, but surely a great solution fpr SMBs also.

Nathan B. • Sholom, it looks like you recieved a lot of great input on this thread. A few main points keep popping up. One of them being that there is no real one size fits all so developing your evaluation criteria up front is very good advice. The other advice that can be very helpful is utilizing a good reseller. The key here is finding a good reseller that will look at your problem objectively and help you evaluate a few different solutions. Be careful of resellers who are partnered with one specific vendor and just want to push their product as you will certainly not get an objective point of view. I hope this info has all been helpful and not overwhelming. Develop good criteria for your specific needs and evaluate a handful with respect to those needs and don't get caught up in fancy feature functions and you should be just fine.

Marc P. • @Nathan Brown Well Said my friend, well said!

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