SAN - do you pull disks & void the warranty?

SAN prices being what they are, do you pull the low capacity drives and replace them with higher capacity drives which you bought from someone other than the SAN vendor?

I had an interesting discussion with an EqualLogic pre-sales engineer about that over lunch today. EqualLogic provides all the SAN software at no additional cost. Any software updates or version upgrades are built into the yearly maintenance contract. Unlike most other SAN vendors they don't shaft you by upselling software licenses which you basically need to properly run your system.

EqualLogic also burns in the disks for 30 days prior to shipping the units.

There's of course value being created by EqualLogic, which justifies the price of the disks (or even the empty carriers, if you were silly enough to not buy a full rack to start with).

On the other hand, disks bought through EqualLogic are of course significantly more expensive than just buying a stack from ZZF or some other place like that, especially considering that one can get the very same model from the online retailer.

So naturally my kneejerk reaction was, well why should I buy the disks from the SAN vendor and overpay by quite a bit. The engineer acknowledged that I could technically do that, it would void my warranty, and it would likely work, however, he also mentioned that I could look at it as if I am stealing.

I would enjoy higher capacity, with all the benefits the vendor provides (less warranty, although I could swap the disk should a warranty case arise), without having paid the vendor.

I am not sure how much profit there is on a 16-bay SAN that retails for 20K, but at first the whole "stealing" argument didn't sit well with me because I figure that they make a few thousand dollars in profit on each SAN. But what if they don't?

A business is certainly entitled to profit, especially when they treat their customers fairly and provide great service. Arguably those who can't afford an out-of-the-box SAN are probably simply not ready for it.

Do you pull the vendor disks and put your own, cheaper, but higher capacity disks in there?

I did in one of my Dell DAS units, but the damn thing cries in the event log every time I reboot the server that the drives are "not certified dell drives"

Plus, after speaking about this same issue with my Dell rep he informed me that EMC even designs their san special so I CANT buy larger drives from anywhere else but EMC.

At work we dont do that....because the warranty is too valuable to the people in charge, and I work in a Christian Organization so its *unethical*, but if I were in charge I for sure would do it.
Stealing my ASS are you kidding they are the ones doing the stealing. The prices they charge for those drives are ridiculous....borderline price fixing. 16 bay SANS that cost 20 grand IMO are a waste of money. You can build a top of the line 20-bay supermicro full blown server for less and if you want iSCSI you can install software for that. I dont know what there cost is but if I were a bettin man, I would say their contribution margin on a given unit is %50. so if they are selling for 20grand it cost 10 to make it.

Thuleman said:

SAN prices being what they are, do you pull the low capacity drives and replace them with higher capacity drives which you bought from someone other than the SAN vendor?

I had an interesting discussion with an EqualLogic pre-sales engineer about that over lunch today. EqualLogic provides all the SAN software at no additional cost. Any software updates or version upgrades are built into the yearly maintenance contract. Unlike most other SAN vendors they don't shaft you by upselling software licenses which you basically need to properly run your system.

EqualLogic also burns in the disks for 30 days prior to shipping the units.

There's of course value being created by EqualLogic, which justifies the price of the disks (or even the empty carriers, if you were silly enough to not buy a full rack to start with).

On the other hand, disks bought through EqualLogic are of course significantly more expensive than just buying a stack from ZZF or some other place like that, especially considering that one can get the very same model from the online retailer.

So naturally my kneejerk reaction was, well why should I buy the disks from the SAN vendor and overpay by quite a bit. The engineer acknowledged that I could technically do that, it would void my warranty, and it would likely work, however, he also mentioned that I could look at it as if I am stealing.

I would enjoy higher capacity, with all the benefits the vendor provides (less warranty, although I could swap the disk should a warranty case arise), without having paid the vendor.

I am not sure how much profit there is on a 16-bay SAN that retails for 20K, but at first the whole "stealing" argument didn't sit well with me because I figure that they make a few thousand dollars in profit on each SAN. But what if they don't?

A business is certainly entitled to profit, especially when they treat their customers fairly and provide great service. Arguably those who can't afford an out-of-the-box SAN are probably simply not ready for it.

Do you pull the vendor disks and put your own, cheaper, but higher capacity disks in there?

Click to expand...

Asking $700 for a $100 drive is stealing, not the other way around. Let me guess, your vendor is trying to pull an IBM tactic on you "you should buy our rack, pdu's, cords, "certified" network cables, etc?

Yes, you will void your warranty, no, it's not stealing. Yes, if something goes wrong or you need support, you are going to be placed on the scapegoat table.

I would have laughed in the reps face and ended lunch right there... in fact, I would have even suggested to his manager that I want a replacement rep or I'll take my business elsewhere.

cyr0n_k0r said:

I did in one of my Dell DAS units, but the damn thing cries in the event log every time I reboot the server that the drives are "not certified dell drives"

Plus, after speaking about this same issue with my Dell rep he informed me that EMC even designs their san special so I CANT buy larger drives from anywhere else but EMC.

Click to expand...

EMC doesn't have "special" designs, thats a nice BS argument from the rep trying to rack up his commission.

EMC uses standard ES drives found on any online vendor website. In fact, you can even get away without EMC noticing (they tend to notice because of ordering history and specs).

nitrobass24 said:

At work we dont do that....because the warranty is too valuable to the people in charge, and I work in a Christian Organization so its *unethical*, but if I were in charge I for sure would do it.
Stealing my ASS are you kidding they are the ones doing the stealing. The prices they charge for those drives are ridiculous....borderline price fixing. 16 bay SANS that cost 20 grand IMO are a waste of money. You can build a top of the line 20-bay supermicro full blown server for less and if you want iSCSI you can install software for that. I dont know what there cost is but if I were a bettin man, I would say their contribution margin on a given unit is %50. so if they are selling for 20grand it cost 10 to make it.

Click to expand...

There is nothing "unethical" about this process. This is like ford saying it's "unethical" to put oil other than "theirs" in your car because it's "stealing".... yep, they tried that one me.... gotta give reps credit for having enough balls to cough up so much BS without getting a beat-down.


The warranty support and the support contracts that comes with these units (not to mention the $$$$$$$$$ that you pay for them) pretty much neglects the price per drive. Businesses considers it the standard cost of business.

As an administrator, you should be careful of trying to save costs... there is a saying out there that can be applied to this situation "no one ever got fired for buying cisco equipment, even though it's a lot more money, but plenty got fired for recommending linksys"

Ockie said:

As an administrator, you should be careful of trying to save costs... there is a saying out there that can be applied to this situation "no one ever got fired for buying cisco equipment, even though it's a lot more money, but plenty got fired for recommending linksys"

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That's really what its all about.
Sure we can club together an ad-hoc SAN in a Norco rack, but if something goes wrong the first thing that will be pointed out will be "should'a bought a real SAN".

My recent experience with the fiscal folks was that it was infinitely easier to ask and get $50K for a SAN and a couple servers to run VMware HA on that it was to buy a 6K server just a couple of months ago. The funding situation hasn't changed, but the change in magnitude of funds requested somehow made it more "legit".

I kid you not, the attitude I felt was "any monkey can ask for a single server to do something or other", but asking for a SAN and starting out with HA is "serious business".

My only regret is that I didn't ask for $250K, but I'll do that next fiscal year pointing to the 50K setup as "proof of concept".

You are taking a chance buying aftermarket drives despite them being much cheaper. Most SAN vendors actually apply custom firmware to the drives they use that not only lock you to using their drives but include fixes for issues specific to the SAN they are running in. Additionally SAN vendors extensively validate and test the drives that they provide. For instance IBM actually spread purchases drives from different factory batches to minimize the chances of an entire drawer full of faulty drives being sold to a business if there is a bad batch. When you've bought a device for $200k and pay $20k a year for support it just doesn't make sense to cut corners in a true enterprise environment as the risk of downtime (and more specifically you being blamed for it by not using vendor provided drives) is too great.

Frankly if you are in a situation where your organization can't afford to buy the vendor drives then you really shouldn't be buying top tier vendor SAN to begin with. You would be better off going with a more open platform and cheaper solution rather than a pre-packaged SAN. That being said drive prices really have come down quite a bit in recent months, IBM charged us roughly $700 a drive for fiber channel 300GB 10k Seagates on our last order. Looking around its only marginally more than buying the drives from a third party and you'd still have to buy the drive trays which no doubt are $40 a piece as they have a custom hotswap board on the back of them. I'm all about saving money but where I work if we lost an array in our SAN the 4 hours of downtime to restore the data and bring all the connected servers back online would cost us far more in lost business than a couple hundred bucks a drive.

I agree with your statements when it comes to true enterprise. However, SANs are moving into the SMB market, largely driven by virtualization technologies relying on shared storage.

Let's look at the Equallogic PS5000E, retails for approximately $20k stocked with 16 250GB drives. One could certainly create a similar whitebox setup for a lot less money in terms of hardware. However, when looking at the TCO things become a little more muddy.

How much payroll is spent to provision a shared storage solution that has the same level of availability, how long does it take to set it up, how easy is it to connect it, maintain it. What happens when a component fails? etc. etc.

The whole, power it on, and have it set up and usable in less than 5 minutes is incredibly appealing, and at least in case of Equallogic all the software is provided as part of the SAN and doesn't require ridiculous extra licensing. That type of "buy and forget" makes those type of units attractive to the SMB market.

However, along the same lines, spending $700 * 16 = $11,200 to add 8 TB of RAW storage (replace the 150GB with 750GB drives) isn't something that is reasonable in the SMB segment. Having said that, I have no idea whether the 750 GB drives are actually $700. I just used that number because someone else mentioned it.

I think what we will likely see in the near future is different pricing levels for SMB and Enterprise markets. At some point the Enterprise buyers will catch up to that the same services are provides to the SMB buyers at a fraction of the price, and then storage vendors will be in hot water.

It just takes one company to "break down" and change their pricing schedule. In some sense Equallogic has already done that by eliminating licensing on SAN administration software and "free" integration into VMware Virtual Center (EQL SANs are VMware aware).

Of course the very argument that SMB needs "buy and forget" is a direct contradiction to pulling the drives and using aftermarket drives to upgrade. In the end it will all come down to budgets I suppose.

As far as my PS5000E goes, I won't be pulling drives, I'll just pay whatever they are asking for them when it comes time to upgrade. Was just curious what others are doing.

There’s a reason that vendors have separate software licenses and it’s to benefit the people who don’t want specific bits of software. Don’t want replication? Don’t buy it!

It’s not that Equalogic provide the software at no cost – they have already built the software cost into the price of the unit.

The drives are so expensive because it covers the cost of maintaining those drives and the overall cost of the unit. Think of it this way – HP sell printers at a loss. They do this because they know you will buy their ink.

SAN vendors also sell arrays at a loss. They charge a high cost for the drives to make money and this way it’s pretty much pay-as-you-grow. You can start off with an array that is reasonably priced and grow. Otherwise the small array costs a silly amount and therefore no small business can afford it!

This also works well with support. The more drives you buy the more capacity you are using and the more use the array is seeing. This means it’s more likely you’ll need support. Remember they have HUGE investments in support, development and manufacturing to cover.

Then there is the fact that in many cases the vendor has burn tested the drives. You go and buy a bad batch externally, you plug them in and after a few days a few die and you have data loss. Risky. If you pull a drive on some array, like EMC arrays, they dial home. You then get support calling you, asking you if you're pulling drives and replacing them or if you're just playing Jenga with the array.

I don’t consider the vendors to be stealing. It’s a business model; like HP and their ink.

I’m not sure if EMC have special designs for their drives but the drives do have a specific firmware on them that is guaranteed to work with the array at the code level you are on. They also do the burn testing and work with vendors on bad batches and root cause analysis for drive failure.

EMC formats their drives with 520 bytes per sector, 8 more than the 512 byte normal. They use the extra bits for error detection in the RAID algorithms. Sorta the same thing that Sun's ZFS does in software to verify that what was stored is what you get later when you retreive it again.

Razlak said:

EMC formats their drives with 520 bytes per sector, 8 more than the 512 byte normal. They use the extra bits for error detection in the RAID algorithms. Sorta the same thing that Sun's ZFS does in software to verify that what was stored is what you get later when you retreive it again.

Click to expand...

Yes, this is true with EMC Clariion range, but not others such as the DMX

Ockie said:

Asking $700 for a $100 drive is stealing, not the other way around.

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Yep, Ockie got that right. Why doesn't the OP purchase 2 drives at $100, plus $500 worth of insurance on top, so that he's covered if things go wrong?