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TomHelp4IT wrote:I did a load of comparative testing a while back between Openfiler and Starwind, using exactly the same hardware setup in both cases, but at the moment I can't remember where I saved the results The basic result was that in most situations Starwind was noticeably faster, particularly in IO intensive tests. We did come to the conclusion though that this was mostly down to the underlying OS, probably a combination of better Windows storage drivers and NTFS being more efficient.
I'd agree with Aitor, provided you get your configuration correct performance is far more down to your hard disk setup than anything else. Bear in mind what your SAN will be used for too, if its simple bulk file storage/archiving then high sustained read/write rates will be most important but they are fairly easy to achieve with modern storage. If you're thinking of putting a big SQL db or a load of VMs on the SAN then the IOps (transactions per second) will be much more important, and then the more 15k disk spindles the merrier, or even better SSDs if you can stretch to it.
HP Lefthand are being nice to me at the moment so I have a pair of P4300 nodes to test along with their standalone software product, which is more comparable to Starwind (and more expensive!). I'm expecting to find there isn't much difference performance wise but it will be interesting to see how HA affects both of them, I'll post a link to my report when its done.
One final thing I'd mention - gigabit switches are not all created equal and "backplane speeds" seem to be more a marketing dream than technical reality in many cases. With a cheap model you may not encounter any issues during setup and testing but when you hit it with production traffic it may well fall apart. If you're spending money on building yourself a high performance Starwind SAN then budget for a quality switch - it doesn't have to be a layer 3 model but you want something "enterprise" like HP or Cisco.