| Hey sunshine! So, you’re saying vsan for horizontal scalability and you regular san for single point of vertical scalability. Yup, sounds about right! I’ve only consumed vsan as a dev, and that turned out... not so good.
Scaling performant storage horizontally is a science and no fun to troubleshoot. Implying you get stuff for free from EMC is just a bad joke, or you have no clue how high the markups are.
It does not matter what the invoice tells you, bottom line counts.
Last time I was involved, admittedly many years ago, the enclosure actually came with a price tag. I was there when the company I used to work for was first through the gates in emea to san boot their physical x86 boxes. What a ride and very little gain. Costed a fortune tho! I’ve worked at a hardware/software vendor (499 of the 500) as an architect within professional services which means I have way to much exposure to the madness going on at the 500s. I’ve built all flash boxes running zfs as well as xfs for specific scalability needs for customers, usually on-prem clouds but other use cases as well.
Commodity hardware. Blazing performance. If I need proper storage experts I turn to the zfs dev mailing list f ex. If you could lower your guard for a sec you’ll see that I have no less than two times pointed out that you can build decent infrastructure with precious enterprise gear.
You’ll pay through your nose tho, and personally I’d rather hire 5-10 super generalist FTEs rather than a vendor labeled expert and a bunch of hardware. I’ll leave you with this oldie but goldie: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-... I know: “that’s not SAN”, but the point I’m making is the mark-up. If you are working at a place that allows you to play the lone ranger and blow everyone away with three letter vendor acronyms, good for ya’! Lone rangers are the biggest blocker for most enterprises from a technical perspective, second only to politics. |