Comments on 'SAN infrastructure'

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  LeftHand is a good iSCSI-based solution for SMB. If Exchange is a significant portion of your workload, you might want to consider keeping that native and not running under VMware.
  
  

  
  

  Posted By:David Floyer| Thu Apr 23, 2009 11:04

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  Thanks for the comment David . Do you know if Lefthand netowrks can provide the same performance as EMC or netapp?. We are a smb with 120 exchange users not a big company our IOPS are around 330 for SQL and about 280 for exchange

  
  

  Posted By:MK| Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:24

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  I have tested the LeftHand solution in my test lab here at Demartek (http://www.demartek.com). The LeftHand (HP) is an excellent solution and it should be able to provide you the performance you need for your SMB environment. It should be able to handle your 120 Exchange users and SQL users just fine.
  
  When you virtualize any application, you will get somewhat reduced performance for that application simply because it's virtualized. This is true for ESX, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. So be aware of this as you put Exchange and SQL Server into virtualized environments. But you get management and deployment benefits when you virtualize.
  
  As far as comparing the performance to solutions from EMC, NetApp or others, it would be difficult say without running specific configurations from each vendor with your particular workloads. However, solutions from all these (and other) vendors can be provided that will meet your performance needs now and provide some headroom for growth.

  
  

  Posted By:Dennis Martin| Thu Apr 23, 2009 02:08

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  Thanks Dennis.
  
  MK, there maybe a sub-text to your question, iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel (FC). LeftHand only provide iSCSI, whereas other providers have both. FC gives better performance for heavy IO environments, iSCSI is in general easier to manage. For your environment, LeftHand iSCSI looks a good fit with plenty of room for growth. As Dennis says, there are many other solutions from other vendors as well that would work.
  
  Good luck, and please tell the Wikibon community what you decide and how it works.

  
  

  Posted By:David Floyer| Thu Apr 23, 2009 02:22

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  Thanks Dennis and Thanks David.
  
  Both of your suggestion are very useful. We are going to go with Lefthand just because it is more cost effective than EMC or Netapp. After both of your suggestion I feel better taking my company towards lefthand network solution.
  
  David, we are not planning to go FC since would be over kill for our environment. I think 2 - 4 Gbps or greated of bandwidth can be achieved via port bonding using lefthand network SANiQ technology and HBA's which would be very close to FC performance for our needs when matched with correct amount of drive spindles.
  
  Once I get this setup will definetly upload performance,feedback and charts on wikibon.
  
  

  
  

  Posted By:MK| Thu Apr 23, 2009 09:33

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  Dennis,
  
  Do you have any performance stats on the lefhand networks SAN when you tested it in your labs that you can share?
  
  Thanks in advance

  
  

  Posted By:MK| Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:27

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  The results from my first testing of the LeftHand SAN are available in the iSCSI Deployment Paper I did for Microsoft a couple of years ago. You'll find this at: http://www.demartek.com/Demartek_Deploying_iSCSI_Storage_Solutions_2007-06.html and on Microsoft's website. I had some of the LeftHand SAN equipment in my lab more recently, but it wasn't for performance testing. I'll look through my notes and see if the data from the more recent testing would be useful for you.

  
  

  Posted By:Dennis Martin| Mon Apr 27, 2009 12:09

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