SAN's

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Hi,

I've been given the task of deploying a SAN and whether its something i could do myself or whether we need to get a consultant in, bearing in mind I would most likely be the one single handedly doing this with a bit of help from my boss where needed. Main reasons behind this are at the moment we only use DAS in our hosts, both physical and ESXi and its time to change this.

I've spent a good 3 days reading up around this unknown subject to me, I am finding it very interesting and am looking forward to giving this project a go. Just wanted to start a general discussion on this forum from perhaps more experienced SAN techies who support one currently or have even deployed one.

What im seeing at the moment is to go for a FC SAN would bring huge cost and require alot of knowledge because its a whole new networking protocol? Furthermore it would be a large project with current servers needing to have HBA's fitted.

This is something i want to do myself if possible rather than tell the company to get a consultant in, from what ive read an ISCSI based SAN could be the way to go as it will utilise the current network infrastructure and encapsulate ISCSI into the TCP/IP packets, one of the pitfalls to this would be if we utilise current NIC's on the servers you need to use software on each node for the encapsulation to take place which will use more CPU. Possibly not an issue?

Just wondering what other peoples experience around deploying SAN's have been and perhaps things to look out for or even whether its not really feasible to be doing it alone with no experience, Should i be steering clear of this, or asking to be sent on a course first etc.

Furthermore has anyone ever built there own SAN, how did that go?

Cheers

 

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Hi,

Its something your going to really need a consultant for I'm afraid as there are many variables before even considering which SAN to buy. The very first thing you need to do is measure the amount of IOPS your current environment is generating (Get this wrong and its failure all the way through) and get an understanding of what you want to migrate onto a SAN and how the current load will affect it. FC is an options but you can go 10Gb ethernet, or even 1Gb ethernet your choice will depend entirely on your current environments utilisation. You might be plumping or FC when its not needed. Also you need to look at each SAN technology and way up the pro's and con's in relation to your environment and the support and best practice configuration for the one you need etc etc.

Its a really big subject and shouldn't be thought of as I need 5TB's of space and I'll just buy the cheapest one that meets my needs.

By all means read up on the subject but if your just starting in this area now, get in a consulting company see what they say read the documents they produce and learn from them instead of learning at 2AM on a Monday morning because the performance of the SAN has tanked.