Virtual File Server software

[APT_SG]

Hi,

We are planning to move our production servers to the datacenter and virtualize remaining servers in the process.Datacenter will have HP blades with vSphere on top.Currentliy we are using EMC Celerra NS20 as fileserver.Since datacenter is using HP kit and EVA 4400 as SAN, we cannot have Celerra there, as EMC supoprt for Celerra does not work for non EMC array.

I have searched for possible options and one of them was to have HP NAS blade X3800sb instead of Celerra.However this seems like overkill for me.We are only using Celerra for about 100 users and 50 servers and I think having X3800sb could be waste of resources.

The other option would be to have a virtual fileserver as a part of vmware environment in datacenter.We only need CIFS to be provided.The only option I can think of is Windows Storage server or Samba.We had a bad expirience with Windows servers used as fileservers ( memory leaks one thing) in the past and this was one of the reasons we moved to Celerra.Samba does not really fit in enterprise environment, however I have no objection to any product that uses it.

What are the other options?We need something as reliable as Celerra with as many options as possible.For example , Celerra has per folder quotas, deduplication, dynamic volume allocation, automatic failover, VTLU, replication.

Also we would need to replicate NAS data to the failover site.We could use block level replication , SAN-to-SAN, but this would mean wasted bandwidth, as we need only subset of folders to be replicated.We used CA XSoft for windows servers in the past and Celerra has option for Celerra replication.

Thank you very much in advance,

Please ask me if I missed any details!

[Bhushan Bumber]

Hello,

Please do a recheck of the statement EMC supoprt for Celerra does not work for non EMC array.
We have moved a Celerra to a non EMC rack and we are getting the support from EMC.

Regards

Bhushan