EMC VNX vs. Dell Equallogic

[pmonkeyd]

I am looking to upgrade my SAN and would like some insight as to which direction (vendor) to take. We're currently running an HP MSA 2012i attached via iSCSI to Cisco Layer 3 switches. The MSA has been okay but we've recently ran into a few IOP bottlenecks and surge in data which is driving a more capable SAN. I really have only two requirements for a new SAN; 1) atleast 23TB of storage space, and 2) atleast 2,000 max IOPS.

I've spoken to two (2) separate resellers and here's a summary of what each is suggesting:

Reseller #1:

Dell Equallogic PS6500E

All 48 slots populated with 1TB 72k SATA disks for approximately 23TB of storage (RAID 10)

This equates to around 2,891 IOPS

Reseller #2:

EMC VNX5300 + 3 disk enclosures (essentially, 45 slots for 3.5" drives)

36 1TB 72k SAS drives for approximately 24TB of storage (RAID 5), this doesn't take into consideration the 600GB +/- on the DPE itself

Not sure of the exact IOPs but I'm guessing around 100 per drive (somewhere upwards of 3,000 or so)

I've read several article that discuss EMC vs. Dell but nothing that really stacks these two solutions up against each other. Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[BharathSr]

Have you looked at Nimble Storage arrays for your VMware and VDI environments?

http://www.nimblestorage.com/solutions/vmware-3/

[lobo519]

One post and pushing a product....sounds like vendor trolling :smileywink:

I do have to say - we actually had a demo of a Nimble array in our office for a few weeks. Impressive in the IOP department! I didn't care for the hardware though. we did quite a bit of component testing and it mostly worked as expected. The support was very responsive as well. The software seems to be pretty good but all the hardware was consumer grade and I could have built it for A LOT LESS. And their scalability options were not available at the time ( not sure that they are now either.

We also looked at the VNXe product but it honestly seemed over priced compared to other arrays at that level. But you can hang cabinets off them as compared to the Equallogic which you need to add additional arrays (but it all gets faster)

In the end it came down to a business decision and we ended up going with a Equallogic 6100.

[mcowger]

(full disclosure: i work for EMC)

Everyone uses the same drives, so if you rate the drives for the EQL at (say 100 IOPs), the VNX would be about the same per drive.

In a RAID5 set (regardless of manufacturer) you'd expect to hit ~2000 sustained random IOPs (at a 70/30 R/W split) with reasonable cache hit rates with about 36 drives (7200 RPM) using RAID5 and a 5+1 parity

So really, I wouldn't compare on # of drives given that both will give you similar performance.

Look at:

1. Flexibility - can you do any protocol you'd want? (NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FCoE, FC, iSCSI) or would you be limited?
2. Vendor support - does your vendor support all the OS/App combo's you need, and do those app/OS vendors support the array too?
3. Application/System integration (esp. with VMware) - does the array natively talk to VMware (VAAI, VASA, etc) and does VMware know about how to talk to the array natively (NMP Path Selection algorithms)?  How about integration with backup & recovery systems?  Exchange?  SQL? Oracle?

I honestly thing those are far more important once you have the bases covered (which either array would cover).

[cmcminn]

Are you looking for FC or iSCSI?  You can get both ont he EMC array, and I believe the only choice on the EQL array is iSCSI.

Currently on the market are some other options as the one poster pointed out...  Also keep an eye on Nimble, Tintri, Pure...

All vendors should be able to provide storage for your requirements.