Moving from AUTORaid to FC60 or EMC

[Mark Paradowski]

We are considering replacing our AUTORaid units to either FC60s or an EMC unit. There is obviously a cost difference between the two units. Ignoring the software products available and looking mostly at performance is the difference in price between FC60 racks and EMC justifiable?

[Dave Wherry]

How many Autoraids are you looking at replacing? How many hosts do you have?
The FC60's will of course give you much more capacity and are pretty easy to manage. They also perform well, but, not like an EMC or XP256. The big arrays really perform well and make it much easier to expand and manage multiple hosts.
Of course the EMC and XP's are much more expensive in hard costs. However, they really save you in soft, or management costs.
It's so easy to add or remove capacity to a host or move data around.
I think the XP is easier to manage. It also scales better from medium to high capacity. EMC has a smaller entry level Symmetrix which is cheaper for just a couple of hosts.
My preference would be an XP, then an EMC then a FC. The choise is usually dictated by your budget. If you've got the money go XP.

[Stefan Farrelly]

As you stated in your question, if you ignore software products and look mostly at performance then the FC60 is just as fast as an EMC/XP256. As long as you stripe your lvols across all the disks and channels on the FC60 the performance will be excellent, and at a fraction of the cost of an EMC/XP256 I would go for the FC60.