It’s All About The SAN

Pete Lill – Fish & Richardson

John Elbasan – Stroock

Tom Crowe – Turner Padget

David Nevala - Lukins & Annis

Pete Lill

Manager Network Services

Fish & Richardson P.C

Pain Points

Decision Criteria

� Snapshots, Replication� Vendor Knowledge

� Performance

� Capacity / Pricing

Usable Capacity?

RAID DP, Aggregates

DISC 1

4

6

7

3

8

DISC 2

5

2

2

4

0

DISC 3

2

4

9

1

2

Parity 1 Parity 2

15

9

13

DATA DISCSPARITY

DISC

11

12

18

8

10

Thin Provisioning

Deduplication and Compression

Post NetApp.

• 860TB total, 640TB usable. 79% storage

efficiency.

• 100% thin provisioned storage

• Average 30% reduction from Dedupe.

• Average up time 169 days. Max 485.

• < 10 ms latency across all systems.

• 30 day Snapshot retention consuming 18 TB

Conclusion

John Elbasan

Director of Information Technology

Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP

EMC|CISCO UCS|CISCOEMC|CISCO UCS|CISCO

Equation

SSSS AAAA NNNN

Business AlignmentBusiness AlignmentBusiness AlignmentBusiness Alignment

How NotNotNotNotNotNotNotNot to Build A SAN

Let’s Begin with the End

Final

Design

Final

Design

The Beginning: Business Drivers

Questions

Dell Equallogic

HP Lefthand

Tom Crowe

Director of Information Technology

Turner Padget Graham & Laney, PA

History

• HP Lefthand SAN Virtualization Bundle

– 2 nodes

– ~ 7 TB usable space

• Dell Equallogic

– 4 nodes primary, 20 TB

– 2 nodes seconday/DR, 15 TB

Decisions & Usage

• Selecting HP Lefthand

• Dealing with Dell Equallogic

Comparisons

• Similarities

– iSCSI

– Fully featured, no additional licensing

– Simple management

– VMWare Compatibiity

– Market factors

Comparisons(cont.)

• Differences

– Performance

– Same name, different results

• Snapshots

• Thin Provisioning

• Replication

– Disk Utilization

– Hardware

– Support

Hindsight

• Living with my SAN

– 2 years with HP Lefthand

– 1 year with Dell Equallogic

• Moving forward, moving on

Netgear ReadyNAS

David Nevala

Lukins & Annis, P.S.

Small firm

• Compellent for many

years

– Good product

– Bought at discount

– Started showing age

– Expensive features

– Relatively expensive for

smaller firm

Explosion of data

• Paperless initiative

• Reducing off-site

storage costs

• Everything virtualized

• Compellent SAN

expensive to upgrade

and maintain

Decisions

• Looked at 7 SAN

vendors

• Looked at doing

ourselves

• Reevaluated

performance and

feature requirements

• Chose ReadyNAS

Netgear ReadyNAS

• Standard hardware

• Linux-based

• Support for all major

protocols

• 10Gb interfaces

• VmWare certified SAN

• Very competitive

purchase and support

cost

Support

• Had catastrophic

failure

– total loss of data due

to electrical system

failure at colocation

facility during major

storms

– Netgear ReadyNAS

support was awesome

– Entire system restored

over weekend

Conclusion

• Working well

• Low cost

• Does everything we

need

• We feel we made the

right choice

Questions?