Don't believe the hype

The hype is crazy. Oz puts it at his most fanbois best here: http://smtp25.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-is-business-justification-going.html when he, like a lot of others, rails that for the first time in history a SAN is off the plate, allowing cheap storage rather than expensive SAN. Now, to use the cheap storage you HAVE (because otherwise you're not supported) to use three or more copies of the Exchange store in your DAG. If you don't use three servers that can operate at no more than 29% of potential (in case one server has to take over the other two) you're replacing 'cheap' (he means SATA) storage for SAS storage and you're not a great deal further forward than you are today.

Even though there are some pretty impressive improvements in I/O with Exchange 2010 you're going to have to be very careful how many users you put on a disk - whether you use a RAID level or not. You will have to ensure that your BlackBerry's don't overload the disk and that's allowing for the leap in optimization that the latest BES software brings.

What about your storage efficiency. Do you really want to have a 1TB disk spinning at 7200 rpm and only use 300GB, even 500GB of it. That's 50 to 70 percent wastage and you can't do anything else with the space otherwise you over-complicate your IOPS profile. Do you really want to implement the Exchange 2010 archive for no other reason than you have the space? Do you actually need to store that data?

And Oz, where are you going to put those backups? I had to blog: http://markarnold.blogspot.com/2009/01/netapp-microsoft-data-protection.html some while ago to help all those Microsoft / Exchange 2007 / DAS zealots who said that DAS was the greatest but needed somewhere to store the backups. NetApp NAS, deduplication, FlexClone and SnapMirror to the rescue. Really, all yous fanbois gotta be careful. I and my colleagues know both sides of the fence whereas anyone Jihading against SAN is either a liar, stupid or knows only the Exchange side.

SAN is not expensive. We believe that http://blogs.netapp.com/msenviro/2009/06/fas-the-new-das-using-fas-in-a-das-configuration-for-exchange.html showed that quite clearly. Even with a SAN we have shown that Microsoft will use nearly 4,000 disks to deliver a solution that NetApp does in less than 600. Oh, and NetApp deliver more IOPS on their 600 than Microsoft's 4,000. Oh, and Microsoft deliver less available storage than NetApp. Yeah, SAN is really more expensive. STFU.

And SAN replication? Microsoft recognise that storage vendors have a very solution on their side of the fence so have opened APIs to allow EMC, Compellent, NetApp and all the rest to plug in to that the DAG can be used across site without having to use the still somewhat bloated and inefficient transaction log shipping method built into Exchange.

Here's something that many haven't considered. So many people are deploying NetApp (and other) vendors' solutions for Oracle, SQL, File sharing and other things that the SAN is ubiquitous; indeed, the NetApp 2000 series is designed for those 50 to 2000 seat orgs and the partners can't shift 'em fast enough. If Exchange 2010 is so good on IO load we're just going to see people drop Exchange onto a DS4243 shelf of SAS and have done with it. We expect to sell more Exchange 2010 on NetApp than Exchange 2007 because now Exchange is merely a 'something else' to add onto the storage. Anyone who says that Exchange 2010 means the death of the modular SAN is a fool and hasn't done their research.

Oz and others like him are doing a disservice to the community when they say nothing more than Exchange 2010 = SATA = DAS. Sure, I work for a SAN vendor but I have a responsibility to all Exchange customers, more often than not to save them from Microsoft and themselves.

Update:
Oz published: http://smtp25.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-is-business-justification-going_08.html today. It's a pretty good article and I've posted some positive comments along with it to show where we are going with the solution.