Looking at Server consolidation...Need Help with SAN

[James Smith_12]

I have a new client who maintains 2 WIN2K domain controllers, 2 WIN2K DNS/wins servers, 2 WIN2K webservers (1 for support site one for Website) 1 WIN2K file server,1 WIN2K RAS server,1 WIN2K Exchange server 2000,and 1 SQL2K Server....

They are all a little long in the tooth....no raid on anything....and the server room is out of control.
all that to service about 20 employees...

I have been asked to look at WIN2003 for server consolidation.... I was thinking of replacing everything with 2 domain controllers, 1 webserver, 1 exchange server,and posibly a NAS.... SQL is no longer needed....and every one uses VPN now to get into the network.

I have been looking into RAID 1 with 40G hard drives for the domaincontrollers... and the web server...and a RAID 5 array for the exchange box...

My SAN question is this would I be better off scrapping the hard drives and doing fibre cards connected into an entry level SAN? and booting off of the SAN?

I just don't see a need for 80 Gig of drive on the web server and the 2 domain controllers...

the SAN just seems to be more efficient way of doing things... I have never done a SAN before and any help would be greatly apreciated.

Thanks

James

[Vladimir Vybiral]

Hello James,

for Your solution, a small SAN seems to be more than appropriate. Please have a look at an MSA1000 storage device - a san disk controller with SmartArray features. Features of this device in short - up to 3x14 disks (HP SCSI Universal drives), multiple disk groups, multiple LUNs, multiple connections to multiple servers, dual controllers for a very reasonable cost. on HP website search for HP StorageWorks MSA1000 information and documents for the details.
This device can be equipped with internal switches with up to 7 external ports (x2 if You buy a dual controller config), which are much cheaper than standalone Brocade switches, but actually are compatible (they are actually Brocade-made) with the features like zoning etc.
so the investment is protected and You can later scale to a larger SAN...

hope this gives You a point to look at, if You will then have more questions, let us know.

BR,

Vladimir

[Mark Grant]

I'm afraid I am going to disagree. One of HP's top SAN guru's visited us recently to help resolve some of the frightening amount of SAN problems we had experienced. His most pertinent comment was "Welcome to the wonderful world of SAN".

Though many people have SAN implementations that work, for such a small system as you describe why introduce additional complexity. Unless you go for dual HBA's and dual switches you introduce several single points of failure. When you start adding tape drives to the SAN and find your tape drives rewinding in the middle of a backup because of SCSI resets from some other device, you really will wish you hadn't done this.

In a large environment with massive and often changing storage requirements, a SAN is just the right thing but in my opinion an entry level SAN is not the way to go. Go for SAN when you need one, not when you might like the "flexibility"

Not everyone is going to agree with me on this one, it's just my opinion.

[Stuart Whitby]

I'll certainly agree with Mark's reply :) SANs are complex and awkward to maintain. They're a real benefit in enterprise environments, but that's where you still get a cost-benefit from centralising disk and tape storage after you've paid all the extra cash for people to support it.

My recommendation is to get a NetApp. Very simple, very fast, very reliable. No problems adding capacity or redundancy if you feel you need it, no problems setting up vlans for different groups within the company, and no problems allocating more space to different servers when they need it. Backups are a snap as well - literally.

Cheers,

Stuart.

[Mike Naime]

I think that it is more of a cost issue. You can pick up the MSA1000 for about $20 K when you add in the cost of the HBA's, cabeling, and Disk drives.

Our W2K folks use it in both direct attached mode (One server wants a terrabyte of drive space), and baby-SAN for the NAS heads. (One pair of 16 port switches with NAS heads and MSA's).

If cost is a limiting factor, you could purchase the internal raid array controllers and use the 4300 series storage shelves that could later be used in an MSA1000 or HSG80 (EMA) configuration.

I have not checked recently, (I do VMS SAN) but 2 years ago, the HBA's for SAN where costing more than the W2K server that we where dropping them into.