Which Company Makes the Best Quality Disk Array Systems for the Best Price?
Our company is building out our SAN and we need to purchase a disk array. Which manufacturer makes the best quality system for the best price? We don't have a ton of money to spend on a top of the line product. How does HP compare to EMC, etc.? What disk array does your IT department use?
Damir Lukic (Owner, Virtual People Ltd.)
Hi Mary,
there is no 'best quality' in storage array systems. All vendors are almost equal and a lot of them is marketing their storage arrays as Five 9's (99.999% uptime), the only question is how much are you paying for the service level agreement (SLA).
Best price is a tricky part, because prices are - negotiable. Nobody will buy anything for the listed price, you'll have to negotiate the price with vendors.
There are several ways to get quite good stuff for a bargain, depending on your need for service levels.
1) Go with used/refurbished equipment of any major vendor (IBM, EMC, HP, Hitachi)
2) Go with minor vendor (CORAID, Compellent, Dilligent, 3PAR, Infortrend 普安)
3) Go with non-FC technology (AoE - CORAID, iSCSI - Equallogic, EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi, etc)
Now, if you really want bang for bucks, I'd recommend CORAID with their own ATA over Ethernet technology. I somehow started to like what they are doing, and the fact that their founder is the guy who invented Cisco PIX firewalls shows their great expertise in Ethernet technology.
Always talk to vendor sales representatives and ask them how they solve the reliability issues (if they occur). Call them all to your desk and ask for proposals, give someone of your technical guys those proposals (without prices, of course), and ask them what do they think. Mark their results, and decide the right choice that can fit into your budget.
Also, if you need disaster recovery site, use the refurbished equipment for this. It's much cheaper, and the reliability is the same as the new equipment. Note that used/refurbished equipment is very often not used or used rarily because the company who bought it went broke, or the storage array was bought just to fill the yearly budget of some large company, etc.
If I think of something better, I'll reply again. :)
Regards,
Damir
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