Any Storage Administrators out there?

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-- Any Storage Administrators out there?

Posted by skell on Oct-17-2008 17:02:

Any Storage Administrators out there?

I've been working on coming up with the right SAN solution for my company and was just curious if any of you out there have recently implemented one for your company? Just curious what your setup is, how you like it, is it easy to manage, etc.

Right now we're looking at solutions from EqualLogic (Dell), but I might also see if HP offers anything in the same range (I think they do).

I'm looking at something that can handle 10-20 physical servers, plus an array at a satellite office.

Any suggestions you have are welcomed. I know there are better forum resources out there, but I figured what the heck...there's not nearly enough talk in this forum.

Posted by r5a on Oct-18-2008 20:35:

I use a tape backup (40TB) here at work that is controlled by HP's Data Protector suite.

It connects to our Oracle DB, Exchange mail stores and backs everything up automatically and if there is a failure does auto recovery. HP also offers 'packets' that you can use to expand the compatibility to a bunch of other things, which are free.

It's a bit pricey (can't remember how much we paid) but it works well. Haven't seen how well the auto-recovery is since we've never crashed yet.

It was a bit of a pain in the ass (somewhat challenging learning curve) to get setup and familiar with, but once you do it's pretty easy.

It is also not only restrictive to tape destinations but a bunch of other supported types are.

And I believe it does have support for remote-branch offices (you can specify lots of options to deal with WAN links and such).

IBM Tivoli's arsenal has something too but I can't comment on that.