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itubafFlag for Bahrain

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Internal or External Storage

Dear Expert,

i am planning to but server, iwould like to know what is best (Internal or External)
any help would be grat help.
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Syed Muhammad Usman
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i suggest you SAN.

Benefits

1) Multiple Rais
2) Fault Tolerance (Raid + Global Spares)
3) Perforamnce (15K RPM)
4) Expandable (No Limit*)
5) Easy to manage
6) server boot from SAN


* most of stoarge support expansion.
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Member_2_231077

A SAN for a single server is a very expensive overkill.

You buy a server it has some internal drive bays - use them. Why pay for more? Why slow it down by having the disks further away from the server than is needed? Just get a decent internal RAID controller and enterprise class internal disks.
internal is better. and faster. and cheaper.

going by that reasoning pattern, i would definitely recommend internal storage for your server.

if you were to tell us, wht kind of work the server would be performing, we may be able to help you in a better way.
is this server just for home use, a media server?
or will this be a production server for a business/enterprise.
what sort of work will depend on this server? critical company work, or just a bunch of movies and songs??
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ASKER

i am planning to buy Blade servers fro my office.

its a financial instiue running very heavy applications and connected to seeveral offices.

the total # of servers will be 8-10.
Well, if you're buying blades you don't have much option because they don't have many internal drive bays so you'll have to buy a SAN or at least external DAS.

Any choice of the make/model of blade servers? That will help decide on what external storage to buy.

Are you clustering, that also affects the decision.

What level of redundancy do you want on the storage, just a dual controller box or multiple storage nodes? Do you want remote replication?

What sort of IOPS and capacity for each server?
i agree with andyalder, any information would help sugegsting good for you.
you wont have extra hard drive bays in your blades to accomodate new HDDs

there are two options:
1) buy pedastal servers, or at least 2U or 4U servers
2) buy a SAN and a couple of enterprise class hard drives - they cost a lot more than your ordinary hard drives, but they are designed to run 24/7
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ASKER

i am not worried about Cost, i want soluution should be

Flexible, Reliable, Redundant, High Perforamnce. i am still finalizing Blades brand. currently IBM/SUN and HP into consideration
if price is no factor, and you have finalized on blades, then SAN is the way to go.

it would be better to buy the SAN enclosures and the blades from the same vendor.
however, get the hard drives from Seagate.

which level of RAID are you planning to implement?
backup? both data and power needs to be thought upon.

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ASKER

i am planning to buy Sun hardware as primary and HP rackmounatble server as H/A
Syed, look up how to spell fibre channel. Fibre channel runs on fiber optic cables. http://www.fibrechannel.org/
sorry for typographical mistake :)