The vendor states that the Cisco MDS 9000 multilayer SAN switches can help lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage environments. They combine what the vendor describes as a robust, flexible hardware architecture with multiple layers of network and storage-management intelligence. With them, users can build highly available, scalable storage networks with advanced security and unified management.
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HPE ProLiant DL
Score 7.3 out of 10
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HPE ProLiant DL is a rack server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
The best scenario where we found the Cisco Storage Area Networking is best suited is for an architecture where we need a robust technology that provides high level SLAs regarding downtime due to maintenance activities. Our infrastructure provides the core to our Data analytics team, which provides the data needed for our commercial and management leaders to make the right decisions thanks to the data. We need our infrastructure to be robust and reliable, when it runs smoothly, we can focus on other aspects of IT Infrastructure areas, giving our inside business clients the service they need.
It's well suited for a VMWare Esxi cluster setup. You are guaranteed to have the same CPU chipset to ensure the servers on the cluster are compatible with each other. We've had to stagger the purchase of systems by six months and have had compatibility issues. It's also well suited for I/O such as MS SQL or Oracle databases, Exchange servers, domain controllers. Pretty much any server setup will work with no issues on the HPE Proliant DL line. It's less appropriate as a NAS server, we had purchased one that ran on Windows Storage. Since it was more or less running Windows as a single controller, we had issues where it has locked up and caused an outage.
iLO Advanced - I feel like this is just a money grab. Give me the remote features, at least the remote console, with the purchase. I'd be OK with paying for the advanced license for more centralized functionality, but straight remote sessions? That should just be there.
Software entitlements and online interaction are a little wanting. This isn't the hardware per se, but enterprise products are often heavily tied to online services and tools and that could be a lot better.
We have been using these servers for many years now and we have used different generations of this product line. We have never faced a catastrophic issue using these and even the smaller issues that we have faced have been dealt with by the technical support team of HP. They have been a reliable partner in our data center.
My rating of Cisco Storage Area Networking is a solid 10 regarding low-latency network is due to the high needs our data analysis teams need on their tasks. They have a lot of batch jobs that last quite some time and that also overlaps in a series of periods during the day. Their batch jobs need to run flawlessly, so our commercial teams can make the right decisions right on time. Our data also needs to be backed, up, when we run backup jobs, it is important that they do not decrease the efficiency regarding the service. This is also a key point in our choice to use Cisco Storage Area Networking as our backbone.
Overall, HPE support meets our requirements. They offer handy 24x7 phone support with clear case resolution interface. Engineers from HPE know their hardware and software. They are polite and help to find quick solutions for their customers. We don't need to prioritize our service requests to account managers to find how to fix or improve our service support.
We looked at the Brocade G series and IBM SAN switches, but the seamless integration into our AAA suite and availability of skills in our local market were big factors. We also have these deployed in FlexPod and VxBlock environments, which the reference architectures provide additional confidence in the solutions overall compatibility, supportability and sustainability.
I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.
Allowed us to move forward with running web-based applications and to scale them as needed.
The lack of future driver support has made it difficult to consider upgrades, we may need to go with more expensive hardware in the future to be able to maintain upgrades.
While we have not realized all the business growth benefits we expected from this investment, we have had much more flexibility and options when we need to change our environment to meet the business needs.
