We need to purchase a new SAN this year, and I am doing research. Does anyone have experience or opinions on the IBM V3700 yet? It was just released in November of 2012, and so far the price and features seem to look tempting vs the other SANs we have looked at.
List of SANs we're looking at directly below, with current setup and priorities below that. Any help is appreciated!
IBM V3700
Dell MD3620i
EMC VNXE 3300
HP StoreVirtual VSA (would build on Dell R720)
Nimble CS220
Dell Equal Logic PS4110
We run around 25 VM's on Vsphere, on 2 hosts (an R710 and an R720). The IO hungry VM's would be SQL logging and controls for factory machines, as well as the SQL backend for sharepoint.
Running HA via iSCSI to our current aging SAN - a Dell MD3000i - currently with 19 3.5" 15k SAS drives. Pretty standard setup with 2 controllers, going to 2 separate switches for redundant pathing.
Requirements:
Faster than current setup - obviously want to try to take a step forward in speed.
Price - V3700 and MD3620i are front-runners in price. The others are a stretch on the budget depending on features.
5 year window - needs to be flexible enough to support us for 5 years
This would include 10gb capability (not necessary yet)
This would include ability to add SSD's, include possible tiering/cacheing features
This means it should stay on VMware's HCL for 5 years
Ability to add capacity or speed (we do NOT need a ton of space currently - maybe 2-3TB of real data)
(Data size is growing linearly and not exponentially)
Warranty and customer support
Bonus points for features - especially speed features. The V3700 EasyTier feature looks interesting, but I don't know much about AND it's not even available yet.
Thanks! I know there a lot of what if's - so especially interested in those with experience in v3700, or perhaps v7000 (big brother to v3700).