I would like some more information about a product to support my home network lab. I’m currently a Network Operations Manager and as such have a reasonable amount of gear to test new technologies personally at home (the title already gives away my nerd status) and I’m looking to create an ISCSI SAN to support my VMWARE installations.

I currently have a FASTIRON server using 10 SATA drives. Currently the system is populated with 120gb drives and I plan to utilize the 2 built in network ports for SAN connectivity. I would like to eventually upgrade these to 250gb drives but don’t have any real need for 500 or TB drives in the foreseeable future. Within the year I would also like to purchase a second server to add some redundancy (not really needed I’m just a nerd).

What product would I need to support my Specifically the Enterprise version seems to meet my needs but there seems to be a very little in the way of reporting/trending and analysis software availability. I’m currently looking at products and would be interested in seeing where your offer places against Datacore’s SANmelody and SANmeastro products.

I’m very eager to try your product as it may have some direct relevance to an infrastructure build out that will be happing within the next six months, but am a little concerned about what seems to be the lack of trending and reporting that is built in from as near as I can tell.

I've utilized HP EVA 5000's and 8000's and we found that the lack of insight into the operations of the system I/O statistics and Read/Write trends was a real failing and had to acquire a 3rd party software to accommodate our needs. I would be particularly interested to see how people are addressing monitoring and trending for the SAN product.