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Max Capacity of SAN Data store

Hi All

I am trying to achieve the following. I want to purchase a SAN storage device that allows me to insert HDDs. I have look at Dell/EMC CX3 it is good and provides up to 60tb of storage however their sales man said that once that is full I can not combine it with another Dell/EMC CX3 to create a 120tb store. If I want 120tb I need to buy another store.

Isnt it possible to buy devices that store for example 50tb add the same device to create a SAN cluster that provides 100tb etc.
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robocat


Have a look at Netapp instead of EMC.

Their devices consist of a "head" (=processing unit) and a number of storage shelves which contain the disks.

First you grow by adding shelves. When the capacity of a certain model is full, you simply upgrade the "head" to a higher model and keep the existing disks/shelves. Because NetApp uses the same software for their smallest to the largest models, such a swap can be done in minutes. This allows you to grow from a few TB to 1100 TB using a single device.

HP storage works is an option as well - up to 1024 TB of storage.
Dell/EMC CX3 it is good and provides up to 60tb of storage however their sales man said that once that is full I can not combine it with another Dell/EMC CX3 to create a 120tb store. If I want 120tb I need to buy another store.

That's not true. You can upgrade the storage controllers with the data in-place so you could have up to 480 drives - that's more than 300TB.
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@meyersd that is intereting to hear...in meantime however "I am really new to network storage" I have read alot and I think I rather need NAS instead of SAN.

I need the storage for a mail server with a lot of users, so I dont think I need all the fancy features of SAN ..and NAS as a remote storage device might be more of what I am thinking about.
So my q would be can if I purchase a NAS device that supports lets say 20 tb and it reaches it support level can I buy another similar device and combine the two together ?

Or should I just keep adding NAS devices and mount them as NFS partitions ?

If your mail server supports NFS, a good NAS can be all you need. Don't go for a cheap NAS because often these are not reliable or have performance issues. The NetApp systems are NAS devices.

If you don't want to go for an upgrade of a device into a higher capacity model, you can indeed use multiple NFS mounts from different devices, and combine the storage capacity that way.

Yes it is possible, I personally like the HP EVAs with VRAID.
It should not matter how large a single device can be, as the idea of "networking" your storage is that it's easy to add more devices later on.  It seems rediculous to daisy-chain storage on a SAN.  You present storage to a device (i.e.: server), for consumption.
The same idea apply to NAS.  NAS is kind of like SAN with a header that understands various file protocols (rather than just SCSI).
Actually alot of features between NAS and SAN seem to overlap..the main BIG difference seems to me is that NAS has an IP address and access to the data is over ethernet while access to SAN is over Fiber or iSCSI ?
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