[Technical] Storage

[Jason Clarke]

Hi Judy,

We use an EMC SAN here.

The outlay for SAN's are quite huge to be honest, but over the lifespan of the machine those costs plummet.

Some of the best Pro-SAN reasons that I've been through over the last 2 years of managing a SAN in a school environment:

SUPPORT! - EMC got in contact with us about a blown power supply before we noticed!
SUPPORT! - The techs we speak to are amazing, ability to troubleshoot niggling issues without escalations.
Redundancy - We had a HDD die. The SAN kept going, my phone didn't ring, no one complained. We replaced the drive (under warranty) and it kept going.
Redundancy - Blown power supply.. No loss of connectivity. No data loss etc.
Capacity - We originally purchased 10x 300GB FC disks, giving us about 3TB of storage. We simply split the drives up into RAID5 over 5 disks. We then allocate X number of GB to a server and it appears. We no longer have to setup RAID on the server.
Capacity - We ran out of space on those original FC (Fibre Channel) disks.. So we rang EMC again and said "we need more space".. We ended up with 15x 750GB SATA2 HDD's on a new shelf. The longest part of bringing those drives online was unpacking the new shelf.
Functionality - We have ClickView (www.clickview.com.au) here.. It uses approx 600GB worth of filespace at this time. We needed to decommission the old server. Luckily all of the clickview data was on the SAN. It took about 2 minutes to detach the drive from one server and push it to another server. 600GB in 120 seconds.. what kind of throughput is that :-)

Our needs are very close to what I call enterprise.. We have over 2200 users here, about 650 machines and an intranet that drives a lot of the schools functions. If I attach a dollar value to downtime of a core server, it becomes very easy to justify the expense of a EMC setup.

That said, if you are at a smaller school, EMC may not be the answer. DLink/Netgear/OpenSource may have products/solutions better fitting.

Cheers,

Jason Clarke
------------------
Network Manager
Glen Waverley S.C.
p 03 8805 6750
m 0418 145 318
e jcl at gwsc.vic.edu.au 
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-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Judy Colville
Sent: Monday, 20 October 2008 12:27 PM
To: tech at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Technical] Storage

We are looking at upgrading our storage at the end of the year and have
been advised to install SAN storage we are wondering what other schools
are doing and if this is overkill?


-- 
Judy Colville
Killester College

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