Best iSCSI SAN

[DanTheMan]

Well I was thinking of £3-5k for the SAN and controllers. Then populate with disks. So seperate prices really, once I have approval for the SAN it will be easy to justify the extra expense for the disks. It's purely for in-house production servers, the odd dev and test platform and whatever else I want to throw at it. But nothing customer facing. Yet.

[n5gooner]

you'd really not get much for 5k. Try looking at Dell Equallogic box's, I've been deploying these for my current client. We've also been using VMWare on them, with booting from SAN etc....

[kirk]

OpenFiler!! HTH!

[JoJoGabor]

For that kind of money the one's I have put in place for ESX are the HP 2012i or the IBM DS3300, both around the same price.

But I have had a bit of hassle with the HP firmware. I once did a firmware upgrade that sh@gged the controller which had to be rpleaced. I have also heard stories of the HP locking admins out. Its fairly new kit

The IBM DS3300 is a more mature product and performs about the same. Apparently the IBM scales better as well when adding expansion trays.

[Bob Dalek]

Is this going to be used by a business for Production? Or is it a test thing? Warning: I am not a SAN guru, so prepare for a big disappointment.

[DanTheMan]

You can get a weedy HP. OK, ideally I'd like to spend £5k. I can probbaly get away with sticking £8-10k in the proposal.

[Bob Dalek]

£5K? Are you sure you can get a SAN for that?

[DanTheMan]

I'm looking for a SAN to hook up to an ESX infrastructure via iSCSI. Have about £5k to spend. Would normally go HP because we'll be using their servers but I'm interested to hear about any others.