Re: [Xen-users] Linux Fiber or iSCSI SAN

[Gordan Bobic <gordan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:03:12 -0400, Nick Khamis <symack@xxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 12:52 PM, Gordan Bobic  wrote:
>
>  The risk issue I might entertain to some extent (although
>  personally I think the risk is LOWER if you built the system
>  yourself and you have it adequately mirrored and backed up - if
>  something goes wrong you actually understand how it all hangs
>  together and can fix it yourself quickly, as opposed to hours
>  of downtime while an engineer on the other end of the phone
>  tries to guess what is actually wrong).
>
> Very True!!
>
> But apples vs apples. It comes down to the warranty on your
> iscsi raid controller, cpu etc.. vs. whatever guts are in the
> powervault. And I agree with both trains of thoughts...
> Warranty through adaptec or Dell, in either case there
> will be downtime.
If you build it yourself you will save enough money that you can
have 5 of everything sitting on the shelf for spares. And it'll
all still be covered by a warranty.

>  But the flexibility argument is completely bogus. If you are
>  building the solution yourself you have the flexibility to do
>  whatever you want. When you buy and off the shelf
>  all-in-one-black-box Âappliance you are straitjacketed by
>  whatever somebody else decided might be useful without any
>  specific insight into your particular use case.
>
> For sure... The inflexibility I was referring to are instance where
> one starts out an endeavour to build a replicated NAS, and finds
>  out the hard way regarding size limitations of DRBD, lack of
> clustering capabilities of FreeNAS, or instability issues of
> OpenFiler with large instances.
Heavens forbid we should do some research, prototyping and
testing before building the whole solution...

It ultimately comes down to what your time is worth and
how much you are saving. If you are looking to deploy 10
storage boxes at $10K each vs. $50K each, you can spend
a year prototyping and testing and still save a fortune.
If you only need one, it may or may not be worthwhile
depending on your hourly rate.

Gordan

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users