EMC, Compaq, Sun or HP ?

[Byron Myers]

Our shop uses EMC and the new IBM Shark. EMC is definately the best in regards to HW, SW, and support. I do NOT recommend Shark, at this time. The Shark is a cluster solution to availablity and it appears that we are finding all of the bugs for IBM - and we are attaching IBM servers only. To replace a component in the Shark, you essentially "fail over" ports to the alternate node, so you lose half of your capacity during maintenance. In my opinion, the Shark is a mid-range solution and will never contend with XP's and EMC's due to its design (clustering). Also, the service we have been receiving from IBM is pitiful. If money is no issue, then EMC is the way to go, followed by HP's XP series.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Just to bragg! I was once in the EMC stress test center before the systems were qualified for shipment. (Cork in the south coast of Ireland)
They used to place the arrays on a huge shaker and shake the bejaysus out of it. It was actually really funny to see. If the array gets through that, it should get through just about any usage you put it through.

Later,
Bill

[Emmanuel Eyer]

We just kicked off EMC from a call to tender. Reason: despite reasonable price (it was a Clariion NAS), performance was miserable. And they (EMC) admitted they could not do better. I must say that in my buisness we look for huge filesystems (1 TB is not enough, 2 is just okay for now) and peak performance in single-client configuration (one NFS client, accessing the filesystem alone, needs over 30 MB/s sustained throughput - over 40 MB/s would be better).

In that (specific) usage Sun's T3 disk arrays are not too bad (but require a rather powerful server, quad-proc E450 and lots of RAM).

On the other hand, the EMC/Clariion box was rather stable when increasing the number of clients - indivdual throughput was poor, but stable up to 5-6 clients.

[Gary Baines]

I'd echo many of the thought already said. I'd be happy with either EMC or HP XP512. My knowledge of the XP is about a year out of date, but functionality wise it gave more than the EMC does even now, letting me assign my disks to be business copies without having to go through a bin file change was the biggest thing I liked.

On the downside though the software was pretty flacky with the management daemons often falling over, one would hope HP have improved by now in this area. Latest EMC timefinder software is easier to configure and manage
than HP's, but again HP may have improved this by now.

Our current environment is an EMC3400, 8730 and 3930 frame and we have no complaints and good service from emc.

[Vincent Fleming]

The EMC is not a bad choice, but the XP512 is clearly the technologically better.

EMC is using a 5+ year-old design with SCSI drives and a backplane. Maximum throughput of about 800MB/s. (this is for the new 8000 series)

XP is newer design, all Fibre Channel (including drives and backplane). Maximum throughput of 1560 MB/s - about 2 times that of the EMC.

So, for about the same price (HP says they'll not lose to EMC on price), why would you buy an EMC?

Beware EMC trying to sell you 2 or more 3000 series (their really old stuff) when competing on price with XP512 - they're 9 times slower than an XP512!!!!

Now software - EMC does not sell software. They lease it - For about the same as you'll pay HP to PURCHASE the same stuff. Year after year. I don't care if it's better or not, nothing is worth paying for 3 times.

Sometimes (all the time with EMC) you just don't get what you pay for.

[Joseph C. Denman]

I agree. EMC and HP are the way to go. Far better technology.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

I'd give one piece of advice to anyone looking to invest in SAN technology, be it HP,EMC, IBM or one of the others...

REFERENCE SITES!!

When one of these companies reccommend a solution you NEED to know that what they are proposing has been implemented succesfully elsewhere. SAN technology is still developing, and there is a tendency amongst these companies to sell you something that just isn't fully tested/supported yet. (e.g cascaded FC switches in a switched fabric config - everyone talks about it, but when you dig a little deeper you start to run into vendor responses like 'not supported in this version of the firmware - new version available soon!')

So when your vendors propose a solution, make sure they let you talk to other customers who have already implemented THE EXACT SAME SOLUTION.

[Larry Davis_1]

What's the approximate price on say...300GB of storage from all these different vendors? How about 2 terrabytes? How is the performance with 180-960 users?