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Dell Powervault MD3000i or Dell Equallogic PS4000XV 8 x 300GB SAS 15KRPM single controller

Hi, in a company they want to buy a SAN. The choices are seen in the title. Company is about 100 users. They want to use a virtualization. VMware or Hyper-V. Servers are 2 IBM x3650 servers and 1 x3550 server.
If it was up to me I would choose the Equallogic iSCSI SAN. But money is a main factor for the decicions to make. Programs will be Windows Server 2008, Exchange 2007 or 2010, SQL 2005 or 2008.
Does anybody have any experience with the Dell Powervault, Hyper-V in a production environment?

Thanks

Irwin W.

I would go with the MD3000i simply because it has the ability for a larger expansion for storage(~90TB) and it has a high availability module to allow you to have four gigE ports for redundancy/connectivity.

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LeonesIT

ASKER

Thanks Brad, this is really a good explanation. I am also pro Equallogic. But this is al about money....

Mfinch

We have a very similar structure and put in a PV MD3000i with single controller & 2 PE2950s last October due to budget constraints. 2 weeks ago, we decided to add a 2nd controller to the MD3000i which I am regretting big time as the NVSRam update failed without highlighting any issues and corrupted the data across all disks. Dell had to completely wipe everything, recreate all virtual disks and groups and we had to restore entirely from backup (this wasn't too bad as we use Veeam Backup & Replication). After a complete rebuild by Dell with 2 controllers, we had a 2nd failure mid-week which also corrupted all the VMs (blue-screens, ntldr missing errors etc....). This time Dell admitted a faulty controller and removed it. To add insult to injury, the Veeam backups taken between the 2 failures were not able to be restored despite Veeam reporting the backups as successful. Luckily we managed to recover most of the VMs with a combination of many chkdsks, fixboot, fixmbr etc.... We ended up losing a lot of data and had to restore from the last good Veeam backup before the 1st failure. We are now back to a single controller and experiencing iSCSI timeouts across the board on most servers especially Exchange. I attempted to export 136KB of support logs for Dell yesterday and all VMs stopped responding for 5 minutes (luckily no data corruption this time). Needless to say we are currently in a battle with Dell to get some stable storage and the company have lost all confidence in the virtual infrastructure (nothing wrong with this but people don't understand).

We are now contemplating replacing the MD3000i with a high spec box (possibly an Equalogic) that will allow SAN replication so we have SAN redundancy.

The moral of the story is that cutting costs to meet an unachievable budget comes at a price and I would not go for the MD3000i with single, dual, triple or even bloody quadruple controllers! Your storage is your entire backbone when consolidating servers and this proves that just disk and controller redundancy is not necessarily enough. I hope this influences your decision making for this project if not too late :)

Thanks

Liam

Elaine_Shi

Brad,

I am facing the same situation of choosing MD3200i vs. EqualLogical PS4000XV. I think the MD3200i is a later version of MD3000i which has 4 GBe ports instead of two ports.

After heard of Liam's story, I would probably choose EqualLogical instead to avoid losing data.

thanks for the information.