There are many blogs and articles going into fine detail about the technical specifications and functionality of each vendors storage arrays but in truth when you boil it all down - they can all pretty much provide the same functionality give or take a few things. It is obviously always important to understand all your applications and requirements and map them to the relevant functionality (or limitations) or each storage system you are considering.
The likely result will be that all vendors storage arrays will support your applications and be able to deliver the performance and IOPS requirements one way or another. This is where the choice starts getting difficult, especially if you don't have experience using the arrays from each of the vendor as they are all made it look like dreams come true in the demo labs. Its a competitive market out there so no doubt they will all be offering a compelling price to attract your business - but beware....
The likely result will be that all vendors storage arrays will support your applications and be able to deliver the performance and IOPS requirements one way or another. This is where the choice starts getting difficult, especially if you don't have experience using the arrays from each of the vendor as they are all made it look like dreams come true in the demo labs. Its a competitive market out there so no doubt they will all be offering a compelling price to attract your business - but beware....
From my lessons learned one of the most important factors that should be part of your decision is one that's very often over looked and obviously not mentioned by the the vendor or its associated suppliers and that is the complexity of set-up and the flexibility of the device itself after the initial set-up. I am mainly referring to the disk and RAID group configuration as this is where you will achieve most of your aggregated IOPS and capacity.
So there is one big looser when it comes to this and funny enough it is the supposed market leader EMC!
The biggest issue I have with EMC is in its static layout of disk groups and RAID groups. In fact, when configuring the device you will soon see how inflexible it is. You have to know exactly how to structure your disk configuration, have separate RAID groups for nearly every function , like SQL, Exchange, VMware,Snapshots, RecoverPoint and so forth that the benefits of FAST quickly disappear after you have to split up your disks into so many different RAID groups loosing your overall IOPS and capacity as well.
The winners here are mainly 3PAR and NETAPP excluding any niche storage vendors and others that I have no experience with. They they have a different way of managing disks in that they group all the disks into large pools and then have flexible volumes or RAID group sitting on top of the underlying disk aggregate. this means that it is more flexible and easier manage and change the flexible volumes or RAID groups onto of a complete disk aggregate.
Whatever you do, don't look over this fact. It will come back to haunt you if you ignore it :)
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