EMC or DEll for Vmware Storage for SMB

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Kasher_Khan

Limp Gawd
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Nov 18, 2005
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Our current environment consists of the of the following

Hosts: Dell R710
Total CPU: 12 CPU (6 core per CPU)
Total Memory: 1 TB
Vmware Enterprise Plus 5.5
Total VMs ~50
Space: 8TB used out of 10TB available.
Current Storage: Dell Powervault MD3200 (24TB RAW).
Dell 6224 10/100 iSCSI swtiches

We are trying to upgrade our storage and have the following two options

Dell Compellent SC4020 (10 Gig)
6 x 400GB SSD, 6 x 1600GB SSD (6TB configured Tier 1)
24 x 1TB NL SAS (16.5 TB usable Tier 2) on SC2020


EMC VNX 5200 (10 Gig w Fast Suite)
3 x 100GB FAST Cache SSD 2 x 600GB 10K SAS
25 x 1TB NL SAS

We are either going to go with 2 Dell 4032F 10Gig switches or Cisco Nexus 5000 refurbished from the gray market.

There is also an Equal logic option on the table with a 6210XS (9TB SSD) and 6210X (32TB) usable. on the table but it is my last option.

All the above solutions have the same price (roughly 80K without any aggressive negotiation yet).

I am leaning towards the Compellent solution but would like to hear from others on what their thoughts are. I can't trust the vendors too much because they all lie a lot and our current infrastrucutre is not a good metric for demand cause other than capacity we really don't have that many constraints based on current loads. I can answer any questions there are.
 
What type of support do you want between the two? How important is your data and how long of an outage could you suffer in case of any major issues?

If you get the Nexus 5ks and can get a TAC contract on them, I'd take the EMC/Cisco solution over the Dell anyda of the week
 
Are those the only two vendors you are looking at?

Also is 80k your budget?
 
Ya if you're bidding emc, bid netapp and nimble too so you can play everyone against each other
 
Kasher_Khan said:
I can't trust the vendors too much because they all lie a lot
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Find a VAR you can trust. Of course they need to make some money off of helping you, but at least they will actually help you and not just sell you gear that earns them the highest spiff.

Langly said:
Ya if you're bidding emc, bid netapp and nimble too so you can play everyone against each other
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Personally I find this approach to be a complete waste of everyone's time, including my own.

The whole playing against each other is pointless, IMHO disrespectful, and just makes you look like a chump at your vendor contact. Decide what price you are willing to pay and which product you want to buy and then just do that.

I have bought a whole bunch of gear over the years and I have yet to come across a vendor who didn't work with me when I had my mind set on buying a particular piece of gear and I had a particular budget to get that done.

If you insist on people outbidding each other then at least put out an RFP and be prepared to go with the lowest bidder.
 
Thank you all the comments so far.

My budget was actually 50k (excluding the switches for the access layer).

We are working with a VAR for EMC, We are Dell partner so don't need that.

The reason for choosing only two vendors for this is because we are working with EMC on other projects that includes their Isilon, Vmax 40k, VNX 7500 etc. We figured it would be useful to have a familiar technology in house as well.

We are a Dell shop as a whole and their support over the years has been excellent. Our existing storage is Dell and the admins have a certain comfort level when working with these tools.

My question was from a purely lab case, which of the above would perform the best in a vmware environement where the majority of the work load is for VMS running different enterprise applicaitons, MS Dynamics AX, Deletek, Sharepoint, SQL and Oracle databases, File servers, other finance systems etc. we expec this environment to grow to maybe double (12 hosts) and 100 Vms in the next three to five years.

The only latency I am seeing with our current system is when we try to do backups over night. Also we have replication software from Acronis but it takes so long with the current setup that is is almost useless. We are not doing snapshots of our disk in our SAN (I would like to - seems to be included in Equal logic but a paid feature of Compellent and EMC). Also we are not doing any SAN to SAN replicaiton primarily because we have no other SAN to replicate to.

Hopefully this is not too much information.
 
If you already have EMC stuff then you might get some nice discount off if you are willing to go for the VNX2.I've seen a 5200 a week ago that got quite big in amount of shelves so expanding shouldnt be too much of an issue assuming the SP's wont drop because of the load.

All of this can be answered bij your EMC/partner rep.

Also, backup windows too short? Deduped backup! (cough Avamar cough) :p
 
Thuleman said:
Personally I find this approach to be a complete waste of everyone's time, including my own.

The whole playing against each other is pointless, IMHO disrespectful, and just makes you look like a chump at your vendor contact. Decide what price you are willing to pay and which product you want to buy and then just do that.

I have bought a whole bunch of gear over the years and I have yet to come across a vendor who didn't work with me when I had my mind set on buying a particular piece of gear and I had a particular budget to get that done.
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Disagree in certain situations especially if you are small enough and just moving up into actually needing a VAR/Partnership with a company. A lot of the sales guys like to get in on the ground floor to start that partnership and they will get aggressive. Its not about getting the bottom dollar and saving money, its about getting to know how the different companies and partners work to get the sale.

I generally do this to wade out any shady business practices and find those Partners that I can trust. If a VAR is no nonsense and won't bullshit me, they have my business. If a sales guy gives me the run around and tries to spin his tires to get me to blow more money needlessly, I start looking elsewhere. There are a lot of factors that have to be considered however so make a list of your needs and go to Dell/EMC with that list and see what they say.

In regards to issues between going with Dell or EMC, I personally wouldn't trust dells support groups but that comes with my previous dealings with them.

Now to keep bringing up a Vsan, have you looked into that option? That may be a solid solution for you as well. I'm loving with Vmware is doing lately especially with NSX and Vsans
 
I agree with your statements about the VAR\Sales relationship. Not all VARs are the same and not all sales guys are trying to be honest. There is always the if you get this by end of the month you qualify for our super discount going on.

VSAN seems like it is a solution designed for people that can't afford enterprise class SAN. It would be interesting to me a couple of years ago but I don't think it competes very well with what Dell and EMC and others have to offer. The idea is take work away from the system and give the SAN CPU more work today, not the other way around.

I am leaning towards the baby compellent solution more and more.
 
Kasher_Khan said:
VSAN seems like it is a solution designed for people that can't afford enterprise class SAN. It would be interesting to me a couple of years ago but I don't think it competes very well with what Dell and EMC and others have to offer. The idea is take work away from the system and give the SAN CPU more work today, not the other way around.
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I/O latency is the single-most prevalent performance bottleneck in virtualization. The purpose of VSAN is to eliminate some of the latency and complexity of network based storage, especially for workloads where that makes good sense (i.e. VDI).

The SAN CPUs are less powerful than most of our smartphones these days. In addition many virtualization environments aren't CPU constrained but either memory or disk I/O constrained. There's little need to offload IO to SAN CPUs anymore because host CPUs are powerful enough to absorb the workload easily.

Of course this all depends on the environment. I am sure that there are environments which are 100% CPU constrained 100% of the time and they would love to offload anything possible to another CPU.
 
Agreed. We are 10% CPU and 75% Mem constrained. No VDI right now though. But again with a 10 Gig network and 70% of the traffic being Reads, SAN seems like the way to go.

I am not arguing that VSAN is not a good solution. it's just not for us at the momenent. We are concerned about picking the best of the two options.
 
Let's turn this around a bit, can you tell us why you want to go with these two vendors? How are they fulfilling your business requirements? You haven't really laid those out completely.
 
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QHalo said:
Let's turn this around a bit, can you tell us why you want to go with these two vendors? How are they fulfilling your business requirements? You haven't really laid those out completely.
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Like I said Dell is our primary vendor for Servers. We are a complete Dell Shop.

EMC because we have client projects that we support that heavily deploy EMC products.


At this point any number of other products for NetApp, HP etc would fit the role. I had to pick two that I have the closest relationship with (and also because that is our minimum requirement when we procure new stuff)

Our existing MD3200 SAN will be easily outmatched by any of the solutions, espeacially if we upgrade our network along with it.

So really I am left with little reason to pick one over the other. I have very little experience with EMC support, but Dell has been an excellent small business partner so far. So there is that...


The most recent discussion I am having with the vendors is whether, CIFS, NAS support is required component. We currently only use block based storage with Vmware but it seems appealing to have that capability. It is optional feature with both compellent and VNX but included in Equal logic.

Also the EMC vendor seeing my negotiating stance has asked if I'd consider the VNX3200e since it is a close competitor to the Equal logic solution being offered by dell (not compellent). A bit of reading does make it seem like it is a baby vnx,

So yeah, not really looking for a right or wrong answer here. Just though some debate between more experienced forum members would bring to light various aspects of each approach that would help me finally decide (other than cost, which Dell is winning at the moment).
 
I wasn't aware that Equallogic could do CIFS/NAS without an additional hardware appliance. We have a few Equallogics still and they're all iSCSI. Before I went NetApp, I looked at more Equallogic and you had to buy some silly NAS head to get it to serve file. I haven't any experience with EMC support, but I do have experience with Dell and I haven't had any issues with their teams.

As for the VNXe3200, there's been several sites talking about how it's almost a travesty to put it in the 'e' category, it performs that well.
 
VNXe's are decent for what you pay, the cheap vnx 5200's are also a nice option on the EMC side. Dell SAN support I've had issues with personally but others may not have experienced the same. My EMC sites have had great support experiences and better turn around time for replacement components.

VNXe does do some file side setup if I remember right. I don't recall if any licensing is needed but EMC does like to nickel and dime on the feature licensing
 
Compellent copilot support are amazing, they are the single best support company I have dealt with, by a long shot!

They will walk you through even the stupidist little things, proactivley contact if something isn't fully healthy (and quickly, not like EMC who take ages).

They like to be involved in any software upgrades / hardware changes as they check everything before and after (and during if your adding shelves) to ensure everything is safe.

In my experience they can't do enough to help and do everything they can to ensure everything keeps running as it should.

Response times are good, there is local support sonno indian call centre but I prefer to go to the copilot team in the states as they are the best. Helpful from the second you get through and you are talking to a fully trained engineer who can deal with pretty much anything, I've only had to have escalation a couple of times but even then I'm still working with the same TSE, its just the escalation engineer joins them.

This amazing level of support was a large factor in out move to compellent from EMC and I've got to say, I'm not dissapointed.
 
Yeah that seems to be the consensus on Copilot. Just all around amazing support.
 
QHalo said:
I wasn't aware that Equallogic could do CIFS/NAS without an additional hardware appliance. We have a few Equallogics still and they're all iSCSI. Before I went NetApp, I looked at more Equallogic and you had to buy some silly NAS head to get it to serve file.
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That's correct, without their NAS head-end FS76XX-series, they're still iSCSI only.

You might take a look at Simplivity as well. Up and coming player who's claim-to-flame is fast dedup on initial write providing for nifty performance as well as native gains in local and WAN replication. I've seen a few units deployed just for their storage alone shared as NFS volumes before full conversion to their units.
 
Regarding the bulit in cifs support I've found you're better off just using block storage and spinning up a file server. Granted I haven't tried the latest generation of products but if anyone else has to manage the files it's a lot easier if it's something they are used to like a windows server.


We looked at Dell Compellent, HP 3par and EMC and ended up getting a 3par unit fwiw. I think for a purchase like this it wouldn't be a bad thing to include other vendors and/or a var you can trust that will sell you what will work best for what you need and not push you in to a solution. Personally I like the way that the Compellent and 3Par organize data and the management on those two arrays is ridiculously easy. I spend maybe 5-10 minutes a week managing our 3par.....
 
Update from Vendors:

So i have the final numbers for both vendors (EMC was holding out big almost 50% discounts as expected)

Note: We are going with a pair of 10Gig Cisco nexus for the access layer for either case.

Compellent SC4020 $70k

VNX 5200 $41k

or

VNX 3200e $33K

with my ~85K budget (-24k for switches). I have about about 60K to spend on the SANs. Compellent is out of the mix at these discount rates that EMC is offering.

I'd like to get suggestions on which of the two options to pick, as they stand now

Options A: Get VNX5200, beef up tier I and II storage capacity


Option B: Get 2 of VNX3200e to get similar storage capacity as option A but more redundancy and same cost
 
Kasher_Khan said:
Update from Vendors:

So i have the final numbers for both vendors (EMC was holding out big almost 50% discounts as expected)

Note: We are going with a pair of 10Gig Cisco nexus for the access layer for either case.

Compellent SC4020 $70k

VNX 5200 $41k

or

VNX 3200e $33K

with my ~85K budget (-24k for switches). I have about about 60K to spend on the SANs. Compellent is out of the mix at these discount rates that EMC is offering.

I'd like to get suggestions on which of the two options to pick, as they stand now

Options A: Get VNX5200, beef up tier I and II storage capacity


Option B: Get 2 of VNX3200e to get similar storage capacity as option A but more redundancy and same cost
Click to expand...

You'll probably have better redundancy on the vnx5200 than 2x vnxe's. VNXE's aren't full HA and shouldn't be treated that way. Doing failovers between their storage controllers can be very disruptive depending on the usage/setup/situation. Whereas the big boy VNX's actually allow for better failover scenarios. Only thing I would consider is how long you can afford downtime and if you want to take a 2nd array to a different location to replicate data to for a DR setup
 
just asked EMC to add more SSD to create Tier 1 based on Flash and add installation professional services.

I think I have made my decision. EMC VNX5200 it is..
 
Ok. EMC came back to me with a number for adding more ssd to tier1 storage. Their number

$17000 for 6 SSD drives in tier I with 1.5 TB useable storage

Does that seem like money worth spending?

the existing config is 3 SS drives in fast cache (150GB), 2.1 TB of usable storage 10K SAS (tier II) and 16TB of useable storage NL-SAS (tier III) all this costs $40K
 
The VNXe is super, stupid simple to work with so if that means something to you, I'd consider the VNXe.

However, the VNX5200 is a little beefier and has more configuration options to it.

Personally, I'd go with the VNX5200. As for flash, don't bother with adding some as a tier 1 storage pool tier. Get some for FAST Cache which can be allocated to multiple Storage Pools or RAID Group LUNs, plus hot IO can be graduated into FAST Cache within 30 seconds where Storage Tiering typically happens during a migration window at night.

Maybe see how much it would be to max out FAST Cache with 200GB drives and add another 8+1 of 10k drives to the array.
 
Child of Wonder said:
As for flash, don't bother with adding some as a tier 1 storage pool tier. Get some for FAST Cache which can be allocated to multiple Storage Pools or RAID Group LUNs, plus hot IO can be graduated into FAST Cache within 30 seconds where Storage Tiering typically happens during a migration window at night.

Maybe see how much it would be to max out FAST Cache with 200GB drives and add another 8+1 of 10k drives to the array.
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My understanding is that the 5200 can do max of 600GB. Currently we have 150GB useable configured for fast cache between 3 SSDs.

I raised the question of using maximizing fast cache for the money but the storage engineer seemed to think that we had enough fast cache to cover us. Even when i asked what if we double our tier III pool by adding 6+2 NL-SAS drives. He still though 3 cache drives were plenty.

17K worth of 1.5TB SSD really seems like throwing away money. I think I'm sticking to the original configuration.
 
Ok. just asked EMC to double the fast cache and instead of 6 x 400GB SSD, well get 6 x 200GB SSD. seems like a better compromise. Total cost 60K.
 
I think you'll be happier with that. While the 400GB eMLC drives would give you a solid amount of space in the SSD tier of your Storage Pool, it can't react quickly to hot IO like FAST Cache can. Since you've only got 9x 300GB 10k drives in your SAS pool they could have problems keeping up with bursts of random IO. With FAST Cache, if a VM or VMs start hammering the VNX hard, that hot data will move to SSD in less than 30 seconds while an SSD tier wouldn't move hot data in until the next migration schedule (at night by default).

Personally, I'd go with 4x200GB in FAST Cache and increase your 10k tier in the Storage Pool to 15 drives (3x 4+1 RAID 5). This would increase your SAS tier to 3.1TB usable from 2.1TB and it should be able to provide about 2,100 IOPs where 9 drives would provide about 1,260. This way the SAS tier can provide more horsepower for your VM environment since the majority of your VMs will live there.

Also, if any of your VMs are file servers or some other stale form of data retention, I'd create separate LUNs and Datastores for that data and pin it to the NL-SAS tier. No sense it taking up room on SAS.

Best of all the 4 Vault drives, 4 FAST Cache drives plus HS, and 15 SAS drives plus HS would still fit into one 25 drive disk shelf so you don't need to buy another one of those. :D
 
Child of Wonder said:
Personally, I'd go with 4x200GB in FAST Cache and increase your 10k tier in the Storage Pool to 15 drives (3x 4+1 RAID 5). This would increase your SAS tier to 3.1TB usable from 2.1TB and it should be able to provide about 2,100 IOPs where 9 drives would provide about 1,260. This way the SAS tier can provide more horsepower for your VM environment since the majority of your VMs will live there.
:D
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Child of Wonder, Thanks for your suggestions. What you are saying makes a lot of sense, but at some point I have to make a decision on config and stick with it. So the config I have provided is the final one for us. I doubt we have the work loads to fully appreciate even what we have configured. :)

THANKS ALL for the valuable input. Hopefully others can benefit from this discussion.
 
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