What do you use for your SAN (iSCSI)?

I want to know what SAN solutions do the most people use.

It can be something preconfigured from storage vendors (EMC CLARiiON, HP EVA, HP Modular Smart Array) or custom-built systems running OpenFiler, NexentaStor, OpenSolaris Storage, StarWind Server, etc.

Thanks in advance.

We have two Dell Equallogic PS6000. One is our master SAN replicating to another unit in a different part of the building. Especially the integration with Citrix XenServer (Volume creation, snapshots, Thin-Provisioning, Desaster-Recovery) caught our interest.

Those are very nice pieces of hardware. You get dual power-supplies, dual-controllers (firmware upgrades without downtime!), each controller has 4 gigabit Ethernet connections, a webbased platform-independent management, SNMP, replication, stackability (up to twelve? units, doesn't need to be the same models), SATA, SAS or SSD drives (hot-swappable), different RAID-levels (including RAID6) ...

Our service-plan is 24x7x4 and the units have a phone-home feature (which can be turned off), which alerts Dell/Equallogic in case a drive is failing.

Only drawback (apart from the price) which we encountered is snapshots not being replicated from one unit to another. Other than that, we are extremely satisfied with performance, reliability and usability.

Ive tested FreeNAS and Open-E. Now Im using StarWind. I'm fully satisfied with their product and service.

If you want to pay for manual $60 - use Openfiler. My storage is <2TB, so I`m using StarWind Free.

We've currently got:

• HP Lefthand P4500 (2 nodes)
• NetApp FAS270c (which the HP Lefthand replaced)

Looked at FalconStor, Compellent, HP Eva, EMC and a bigger NetApp before going for the Lefthand, which did most of what the NetApp/EMC did but at half the price. We wanted something with good 'enterprise' grade 24x7 4 hour response support for when it hit the fan so this ruled most of the freebies/low cost solutions out.

A drawback of using iSCSI if you're not aware of it, VMWare do not support MicroSoft Clustering Services on iSCSI/NFS storage under ESX/vSphere. This may change in the future. This was a bummer as we were looking at clustering our SQL Server's on to VMWare/Lefthand.