Hi all, I had a few meetings with SAN vendors and I thought I'd give you some follow-up on points of potential interest. - Dell/EMC The representative was like the Dell dude grown up. The sales pitch mentioned "price point" about twenty times (to the point where it was annoying), and the pitch ultimately boiled down to "Dude, you're getting a SAN." My apologies in advance to bringing back repressed memories of the Dell dude. As far as technical stuff goes, it's about what you'd expect from a low-level SAN. The cost for a SAN was in the $2-3 per GB range if you went with the cheap option...not terrible, but not great either, especially since you'd have to buy lots of GB. Performance numbers weren't bad, but they weren't great either. - 3par The sales pitch was more focused on technical aspects and only mentioned "price point" twice...which is a win in my books, at least compared to Dell. Their real place to shine was in the technical aspect. Whereas Dell just wanted to sell you a storage system that you put on a network, 3par wanted to sell you a storage system specifically designed for a network, and change the very way you think about storage. They had a bunch of cool management concepts, and very advanced failover, power outage, and backup techniques and tools. Performance wasn't shabby, either, for instance a RAID 5 set could get about 90% the IOPS and transfer rate that a RAID 10 set could. How exactly this compares to DAS they didn't say. The main stumbling block with 3par is price. While they didn't give any specific numbers, best estimates put a SAN in the $5-7 per GB range. The extra features just might be worth it though. - Lefthand This is going to be an upcoming meeting, so I don't have as good of an opinion. Looking at their website, they seem more to the Dell end in terms of price and functionality. I'll keep you in touch as I have more info. They seem good for entry-level SANs, though. Luckily, almost everything here works with Linux (at least the major distros), including the management tools, in case people were worried about that. One of the key points to consider going forward is that the competition of iSCSI and Fibre Channel techs will likely bring price down in the future. While SANs are certainly more expensive than their DAS counterparts, the gap appears to be closing. However, to paraphrase a discussion between a few of my co-workers, you can buy toilet paper or kitty litter in huge quantities because you know you'll eventually use it...and it doesn't change in performance or basic functionality. Storage is just something that you don't always want to buy a lot of in one go. It will get bigger, and cheaper, and probably faster in a relatively short amount of time. The other thing is that you can't really get a small SAN. The minimum is usually in the multiple TB range (and usually >10 TB). I'd love to be able to put together a proof of concept and a test using 3par's technology and commodity 80GB slow disks, but I really can't. You're stuck with going all-in right away, and enough people have had problems being married to specific techs or vendors that it's really hard to break that uneasiness. Thanks for reading, hopefully you found it slightly informative. Peter -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
