kjnicoletti
Cadet
- Joined
- May 2, 2015
- Messages
- 9
I have worked as a network engineer at medium sized health care companies (700-7000 employees) for over 20 years now. I have administered SANs from HP, Dell, NetApp, and EMC as well as NASes from Dell, Buffalo, HP, FalconStor and Synology. At home I have a FreeNAS for storage and Plex.
Here's my two cents FWIW to you:
Buy a real SAN with redundant controllers. Don't try to make your own SAN out of FreeNAS if the VM guests you will run are production and critical to your company.
Edit: a real SAN with redundant controllers AND support. And keep paying for the support for the life of the SAN :) Oh and dedupe has no place in a performance SAN. Dedupe is a feature you want on your NAS you send your backups to, not your SAN.
iSCSI can save you a few dollars in a new SAN purchase, but a dedicated FC fabric is going to be better performance.
I keep stressing performance since you spoke of MSSQL. But really, it all depends on how you are using SQL - a lightly used SQL server can get by with just about anything, but a heavily hit SQL server has to be well architected.
Here's my two cents FWIW to you:
Buy a real SAN with redundant controllers. Don't try to make your own SAN out of FreeNAS if the VM guests you will run are production and critical to your company.
Edit: a real SAN with redundant controllers AND support. And keep paying for the support for the life of the SAN :) Oh and dedupe has no place in a performance SAN. Dedupe is a feature you want on your NAS you send your backups to, not your SAN.
iSCSI can save you a few dollars in a new SAN purchase, but a dedicated FC fabric is going to be better performance.
I keep stressing performance since you spoke of MSSQL. But really, it all depends on how you are using SQL - a lightly used SQL server can get by with just about anything, but a heavily hit SQL server has to be well architected.
Last edited: