Do you need a SAN yet?
Can you justify a SAN today? If so, don’t buy all your disks upfront because they’ll be cheaper soon. And if you’re not taking advantage of the SAN’s advantages in multiple server support, RAID or high throughput, a NAS is still your best value.
“It seemed like every student got a digital camera for Christmas in 2002. Three months later, my student server’s 30 or 40 gigabytes of extra disk space had disappeared, and I had to add another 300,” says Mike Magaldi, technology director at St. Mary and All Angels School in Aliso Viejo in Orange County, Calif.
Suddenly, Magaldi became a hot demographic: a small business that needs lots of storage. Enterprise storage vendors now believe SMB stands for “SANs for My Business” as storage-area networks travel down market.
Magaldi wound up buying an HP StorageWorks MSA1000 Small Business SAN Kit , which includes QLogic Host Buss Adapters (HBA) and an 8-port Fibre Channel SANbox switch. Cost: about $10,000 – a good price for a real SAN but a lot of money for a private school (pre-k through 8) with only 800 students. Then Magaldi told me he’s only got 428G bytes installed.
Ten grand for 428G bytes of storage? That’s way too much to pay, so he must have had other reasons for buying a SAN. Maybe he needed direct storage connections between multiple servers or access to high-availability storage.
“No, I just connected it to the new HP ProLiant storage server it came with,” Magaldi says.
Maybe he needs RAID to store critical data for maximum uptime.
“No, I still backup to tape,” he says.
When I asked why he chose a SAN , he said, “The local dealer said that’s what we needed.” I’m a big fan of local dealers, but I started to think Magaldi got taken.
Here’s how I would discuss Magaldi’s storage options if he came to me. First, 500G bytes is an easy upgrade to server storage. Fast 250G-byte disks cost less than $150 online, so 500G bytes costs about $300. The storage is tied to one server, but so is Magaldi’s SAN right now.
NAS servers add storage separate from the servers. HP’s own HP ProLiant ML110 Model 640G-byte Storage Server costs $2,750. The Iomega 200d 480G-byte NAS costs less than $2,000. Soon I’ll review a new NAS unit from Buffalo with 1 terabyte for $1,000.
I’ve used the pre-merger Compaq version of the HP SAN and was impressed. But to justify the cost you need either A) a group of servers to support, B) critical data to keep online or C) substantial throughput requirements.
As Magaldi told me more, his choice made some sense. The SAN supports 100G bytes of video editing work done by students, so throughput does matter. His budget request for next year will plug six of his other eight servers into the SAN and add more disks. Another 26 student computers will come online, increasing the server load.
I don’t know if a NAS would have satisfied Magaldi’s future needs, but it would have held him for this year and maybe next. Since storage costs keep dropping, I expect SANs to keep following that curve. Putting two NAS units on your network and copying files from one to the other nightly provides storage and redundancy on a budget.
Can you justify a SAN today? If so, don’t buy all your disks upfront because they’ll be cheaper soon. And if you’re not taking advantage of the SAN’s advantages in multiple server support, RAID or high throughput, a NAS is still your best value.
