SAN -vs- NAS

[Carlosinfl]

My office is tired of buying larger drives for servers that require more disk space and others that have lots of space are using 1% of the disk.

Right now we have 10 Dell blades and since they only have 146GB's of disk space with the mirror, we're looking to have some kind of NAS or SAN solution that all servers can attach to and allocate data as needed. I was wondering if anyone can tell me which is a better solution or what aspects do I need to evaluate before purchasing one or the other?

If I have a NAS or SAN that has 4TB of space, can I set / allocate specific size restrictions for each server connecting to the device?

 

[geiger]

What blade chassis do you have? 10 blades sounds 1855/1955ish.

With a NAS you use some form of network shares NFS/CIFS(SMB) and tell the server to use the data there.

With a SAN you carve up a volume and present each host a LUN/partition.

Depending on if you go FC or iSCSI you will need to install additional passthrough modules in the back of the blade chassis.

 

[bigshooter]

If you go fiber channel you will need to get the Qlogic daughtercards for any of the blades you want to connect to the SAN, and if they will be the only devices on the fabric you can also purchase the Brocade switch module(s) for the chassis and then plug your disk array directly in there.

If you want ISCSI you could always just dedicate on of the integrated nics to a private storage network and not have to purchase anything additional (I'm assuming Dell wouldn't sell you a 1955 Chassis without two passthrough or two ethernet switch modules.)

 

[Treyshadow]

Since you are already Dell invested, have you looked at the Equalogic products? They have a very intriguing iSCSI solution.