San on Evan Hoffman

Using WAL archiving & Compellent snapshots for PostgreSQL backups

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:46:40 +0000

Changing my Postgres DB backup strategy from nightly pg_dumps to WAL archiving with SAN snapshots.

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

I noticed a bunch of people landing on this site by searching for “compellent sucks.” I just want to avoid any confusion: Compellent doesn’t suck. Now that the pain of spending the money to expand our Compellent SAN is in the past, I am back to being in love with the product. The only gripe I’ve really ever had with Compellent is the price, and as Ben Franklin said:

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

The bright side of Compellent

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

Oh, Compellent... again with the disk prices.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:57:04 +0000

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

The SAN Scam

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:03:11 +0000

It’s time to buy some more disks for the SAN we have at work. The SAN is made by Compellent and we’ve had it for a year and it’s been great. One of the selling points was the ability to add disks however we wanted - one at a time is possible, which apparently isn’t the case with other SAN products. The one we looked at from LeftHand expanded by purchasing entire nodes, so the incremental cost was pretty high. Compellent seemed to have a higher initial cost but cheaper incrementally.