SAN Products Short List
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The short list for me is EMC, HDS, HPE 3PAR, Nimble and Tintri for enterprise. Synology, ReadyNAS for SMB.
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Drobo has a place with the B810i and B1200i SAN devices. Pretty entry level, but can be useful. They are super easy to use.
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HPE under 3PAR, I'd avoid. Dell branded SAN (Compellent, EquaLogic) I would avoid. Dell bought EMC and things are moving there, don't play around with their legacy "didn't make it" equipment. EQL was never good gear, costs too much to be SMB, isn't enterprise grade. Compellent is replaced with EMC's VNX lines, stick with EMC if you want Dell.
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NetApp often gets mentioned in these circles, but NetApp only makes NAS devices. They bolt SAN on top of the NAS (much like what Synology and ReadyNAS do) but on the high end this makes no sense. Shop NetApp when you want a high end NAS or a NAS with some extra SAN functionality, but if you are SAN shopping, NetApp should never even get name dropped.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List:
HPE under 3PAR, I'd avoid. Dell branded SAN (Compellent, EquaLogic) I would avoid. Dell bought EMC and things are moving there, don't play around with their legacy "didn't make it" equipment. EQL was never good gear, costs too much to be SMB, isn't enterprise grade. Compellent is replaced with EMC's VNX lines, stick with EMC if you want Dell.
Good point about EQL. I've often thought the same, but keep seeing people buy them. I hadn't tried Compellent since Dell bought them, and with the huge acquisition of EMC, I'd anticipate that Dell would take all the tech from EQL and Compellent and roll it up into the single brand name of Dell-EMC... unless they want multiple brands, Dell-EMC for enterprise, and EQL for SMB. But EQL is already too spendy for SMB, and I don't see them just all of a sudden dropping the price to be more competitive.
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@BBigford said in SAN Products Short List:
Good point about EQL. I've often thought the same, but keep seeing people buy them.
The majority of the SMB is driven by sales and marketing, not the suitability of products. You'll also notice that the vast majority of EQL sales are in IPOD setups where they have no place having any SAN whatsoever. So doubly bad. It's a bad product used in bad ways (most of the time.)
The low end SMB storage makes sense as non-critical path storage, meaning not for live VMs or live production data. Great for backups, archives, offloading, secondary storage, labs, etc. Once you have critical path storage, you need (99.99% of the time) enterprise storage with enterprise features and support and that limits you to the big boys of EMC, HDS, HPE and their competition like Nimble.
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@BBigford said in SAN Products Short List:
I'd anticipate that Dell would take all the tech from EQL and Compellent and roll it up into the single brand name of Dell-EMC...
I think that they will just scrap it all. Don't think that they have any tech that the EMC brand would want to use.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List:
@BBigford said in SAN Products Short List:
I'd anticipate that Dell would take all the tech from EQL and Compellent and roll it up into the single brand name of Dell-EMC...
I think that they will just scrap it all. Don't think that they have any tech that the EMC brand would want to use.
Valid. Curious to see if they end up with SMB & enterprise line ups, or if they just have Dell-EMC across the board. Another option is they stop trying to capture anything from SMB and only go after enterprise...
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@BBigford said in SAN Products Short List:
@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List:
@BBigford said in SAN Products Short List:
I'd anticipate that Dell would take all the tech from EQL and Compellent and roll it up into the single brand name of Dell-EMC...
I think that they will just scrap it all. Don't think that they have any tech that the EMC brand would want to use.
Valid. Curious to see if they end up with SMB & enterprise line ups, or if they just have Dell-EMC across the board. Another option is they stop trying to capture anything from SMB and only go after enterprise...
EMC has pretty much a full range. There is really no product in the Dell line up that has a reason to exist any longer.
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@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List:
@BBigford and @zuphzuph were asking about this and I figured we should talk about it here. If you are shopping for a SAN, what is your vendor short list?
How does PureStorage fit into all of this?
