[geeks] SAN opinions

[Dan Duncan]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Dan Sikorski wrote:
> What brand of SAN equipment is considered to be the best?  I'm looking
> at a project to potentially put in a SAN for some Dell windows servers.
> Dell sells rebadged EMC products, which from my understanding mostly has
> a reputation for being overpriced. While price is not the only concern,
> i don't want to waste money.  What does the geeks collective reccomend?

I've built two fairly large SANs.  Once was a Compaq SAN connecting
8 Alphaservers (8400) and 3 HSG80 (FC hardware RAID) cabinets with two
16-port Compaq-branded SAN switches.

The other was a multi-vendor SAN for backups that connected a NetApp
filer, an EMC Celerra, two Windows 2000 boxes, and 3 Sun V880s to
a shared IBM tape library (12 LTO drives/638 slots) using EMC-badged
16-port SAN switches.

The switches in both cases were actually rebadged Brocade equipment
and I never had any trouble with either setup.

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# There's more than one way to skin a cat.
# Method #39: turpentine and a paint stripper