3PAR

So we went to 3Par Headquarters today and got our hands dirty with their storage systems. Overall I was pretty impressed. These guys know what they're talking about. It's refreshing to find a storage company that's focused on...storage. There are other high end storage companies that either get bored, or get greedy, or get stupid, but they start offering software and other products that, although they might be great products, have nothing to do with storing data. 3Par only has 3 models, but really they have 2 products (the E class and the S Class). The E Class is what we're looking at to start. It's no slouch though. It will store up to 96 TB of data and is wicked fast. They make it incredibly easy to create volumes, change RAID type (online), dynamically optimize the entire system, etc. either through their Java GUI (yuck) or their powerful CLI. Their system can use both Fibre Channel and SATA (they call it Nearline) drives, and you can mix and match as you please. They also invented "thin provisioning" of volumes which means you can export a volume to a host and the host will see, say, 100 GB's, but it's not really using all that space in the beginning. It gives out storage to the host little by little (I think the default is 30 GBs or something) but the host never knows. So if your users say they absolutely need 100 GB's of space, but you're pretty certain they don't, no need to argue. TP to the rescue!

Anyway, it was a very informative visit. We have Citrix coming in tomorrow to drop off an eval NetScaler. So next week I'll write about our experiences with using both the Big-IP and the NetScaler. Stay tuned.