WAN Accelerator recommendations?

Networking/Security Forums -> Networking

Author: graycatLocation: London, UK PostPosted: Thu Apr 14, 2011 4:25 pm    Post subject: WAN Accelerator recommendations?
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I've just dropped a few SANs in two offices as part of a DR / off site replica solution and am starting to look at WAN accelerators for between the two sites.

My main reason for thinking that is as block sizes are quite large within the volumes, a lot of the traffic will be repeated and as such wasted bandwidth.

Does anyone have any recommendations for kit to evaluate?

The SANs are Dell Equallogic's if that helps at all.

Author: ryansuttonLocation: San Francisco, California PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 12:26 am    Post subject:
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That sounds like a pretty serious DR site. Are you using V-Sphere for DR/failover?

Author: PhiBerLocation: Your MBR PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 1:47 am    Post subject:
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Graycat,
Just curious - what's SAN's are you using? Are you happy with them?

Author: graycatLocation: London, UK PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 8:53 am    Post subject:
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ryansutton wrote:
That sounds like a pretty serious DR site. Are you using V-Sphere for DR/failover?
Not really but it has the potential to be next year! Smile

At the moment it's a three vmware physical host primary site running off of two SANs (a PS4000-SATA and a PS6000-SAS) with the remote site running one physical host and one PS4000-SATA. The plan is that there will be cross site replication at the SAN level of primary file stores and critical VM servers however it won't be a full site "fail over" just yet ...... that's my plan for next year Wink

PhiBer wrote:
Graycat,
Just curious - what's SAN's are you using? Are you happy with them?
Dell Equallogic PS4000's and PS6000's. To be honest I can't fault them for the price. I looked at just about every other SAN out there in a review that took almost a year (18 months including an office move) and bar deduplication I couldn't find a fault with them.

Author: PhiBerLocation: Your MBR PostPosted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 5:48 pm    Post subject:
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Graycat,
Thanks for the info. Did you happen to look into Dell's Compellent line by any chance? If so, what were the pros/cons of Compellent vs. Equalogics from the Dell line?

I hear HP has terrible SAN's compared to Dell. Thoughts?

Thanks,
PhiBer

Author: graycatLocation: London, UK PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 11:12 pm    Post subject:
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PhiBer wrote:
Graycat,
Thanks for the info. Did you happen to look into Dell's Compellent line by any chance? If so, what were the pros/cons of Compellent vs. Equalogics from the Dell line?

I hear HP has terrible SAN's compared to Dell. Thoughts?

Thanks,
PhiBer
I did review both of those offerings from Dell but I can't remember why we went for Equallogic in the end. I'll try and dig out my assessment report and let you know.

HP basically have two offerings - a low end one which is basically DL380's with no OS clustered together to offer sufficient storage and a higher end one to compete with NetApp. The higher one was out of our budget range and the HP was the worst one I've ever seen! I usually love HP's offerings but they really have a lame duck with that one IMO.

I did run across a new product that's produced by the guys who designed the Dell kit - GreeBytes. I was really impressed with the spec, capabilities and cost of these. The only thing that put me off was how young they are - less than two years old when we evaluated them. If I was buying something for a test environment then I'd definitely get one of these.

Author: PhiBerLocation: Your MBR PostPosted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 11:36 pm    Post subject:
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I am very intrigued by Compellent's fluid storage (i.e.being able to add various sized drives with different speeds)! I don't think Equallogic can do that, can it?

Author: JaferLocation: UK PostPosted: Mon May 09, 2011 10:03 pm    Post subject: WAN Accelerator
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For WAN acceleration Controllers, I would recommend Riverbed, F5 or Bluecoat. These three vendors are well established and highly rated however might also be expensive. I don't have personal experience with these, but hear about them often.

Also take a look at Exinda which I have seen for myself and is a very good product.

Author: graycatLocation: London, UK PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2011 1:15 pm    Post subject:
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Cheers for the recommendations, guys.

I've been reviewing some options with third parties and will be looking to trial some VMA based solutions between the two sites. We've been looking at one in particular which has been developed with VMware and Dell for their Equallogic SANs. Apparently an 80% drop in chatter between replication partners is a realistic target.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Author: WeaverLocation: WI, USA PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2011 5:04 am    Post subject:
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Letting the storage hardware perform replication directly is one option -- with both pros and cons.

I have found a layer higher solution like Veeam Backup and Recovery to work better in my environments. Veeam B&R 5, storage agnostic, can backup and replicate VMFS datastores and individual guest VMDK's -- however you choose.

*Source-side* block-level de-dupe, compression, and support for vSphere 4 Change Block Tracking (CBT) are features that ultimately result in faster backup and replication greatly reducing over-the-wire transfer sizes.

The thing I like about storage agnostic storage backup and replication solutions is that the backup and replication is the number one priority of the vendor whereas using a SAN's built-in backup and replication (specifically replication) tends to be an exercise in "why didn't they?" and "why can't they?"

My experiences come from VMware vSphere on EMC CX4's and Dell MD32xx's. YMMV.

-Weaver



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