From: Ryan Shugart [mailto:rshugart@pcisys.net] Sent: 08 September 2008 16:45 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: looks like we're getting a SAN Hey all: A while ago there were a few people asking about SAN and storage products. At the time I had mentioned my company was looking at going with SanMelody. We've decided not to go that route afterall, not that there's anything wrong with SanMelody, we've just found something that might meet our needs even better. We're still waiting for upper management approval, but it looks like we're going with the Storage Director Z300 from PogoLinux http://www.pogolinux.com/bomquotes/webbom?system=133 It seems like a pretty neat device, the underlying storage technology is Sun's ZFS, and as a result there is no hardware RAID on the box. I don't know too much about ZFS yet, but I'm made to understand ZFS handles the RAID on its own without any hardware controllers. We'll be using this device as an ISCSI target mainly for our ESX servers, but also our SQL server and a couple other Windows Server 2003 machines. I've been able to play with the interface and its very accessible. In adition to the web interface, there are two command lines, one provided by the appliance's OS and a regular Unix BASH shell. And the price is right too, we're getting a 9TB unit and full onsite support for under $13000. From what I've seen you can't beat that in the SAN world. I'll let you know how this works once we get the unit installed, but in the mean time I wanted to point anyone looking for cheap storage this way as something to think about. Ryan