I know a lot of you have been searching for good SMB Hyper-V solutions. Well here is a really nice one that I have just recently designed for one of my smaller customers. They have around 150 users worldwide and about 30 workloads.
They business is driving them for a level of higher availability and as always reducing costs. They asked if there was a good solution that would encompass all of their needs today and now blow their budget out of the water.
Normally when a customer wants high availability for virtualization it means the acquisition of a costly ISCSI SAN. I would normally without hesitation recommend a solution from Dell and their Equallogic line-up.
Main reason is that these units are incredibly robust and I haven’t ever been called back to a customer site with issues post implementation.
Problem is the price point. They start on the low end at around 18 – 25 K. This is normally at least half to one third of the infrastructure capital budget for most small organizations.
So my HA Solutions for SMB have always look like this:
For example:
2 x Dell R310’s with 96GB of RAM and 2 x Quad port GB Nics
1 x Dell Equallogic PS4000E with 16 TB of Storage – 16 1 TB Drives – 16 TB RAW (12 TB in Usable in Raid 5)
2 x Layer 2 Switches
Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter Edition for each of the Servers
System Center Virtual Machine Manager and or other components.
This would normally Net out to well over 60 K.
So the issue for most business owners when looking at capital expenditures is this. How much additional revenue will a solution like this cost the company to pay for it.
Well if the company has a NET Profit range of 10 % – It would cost around 500 K in net new revenue to pay for this.
Hey let’s face it the economy is really tight – If was can save money and have a robust solution anyone will look at it. Remember for most SMB customers sometimes an entry level solution is all they need.
Well take a look at my new design for these SMB Customers.
2 x HP DL 380 G7’s with 128 GB of RAM and 2 x Quad port GB Nics
3 x QNAP SAN’s with TB of Storage – 12 3 TB Drives 36 TB RAW (28 + usable in Raid 5)
2 x Layer 2 Switches
Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter Edition for each of the Servers
System Center Virtual Machine Manager and or other components.
The price point for this solution just came in at a little over 30 K for hardware.
This is about half the cost of the other solution. So we will see how it goes – it will be my first couple of deployments using the QNAP technology. Hopefully it doesn’t disappoint.
Enjoy…
Dave
