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Used Compellent Series 20 vs New
Hey guys,
I'm looking at moving away from our old AX4-5i to a new SAN, and Compellent has been at the top of the list. I recently came across someone selling a Series 20 for what appears to me to be a very good price. I really don't know enough about this stuff though to say whether I'd be wasting money going with a Series 20, or if it would be good enough for what our business needs. I've seen some comparisons between the hardware on the 20/30/40, and understand that they are single/dual/quad core and 2.5g/3.5g/4g on the data cache. Does all that really matter though, or is the bottleneck still in the drives primarily? Are the upgrades mainly in the software? Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. Kind of hard trying to find an unbiased opinion on this in a sea of vendor sourced information.
Lance Boley
23 Posts
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December 6th, 2011 20:00
I would want the warranty, maintenance and the comfort of knowing I have brand new hardware. You are going to get the latest updates already applied and a system that you know is going to be supported, not to mention you can get exactly what you need to fit the companies requirements.
I have had very good luck with used equipment for my personal use, but then again I also do not over load it and take really good care of it. It has served me well for testing and just getting to know and understand how it works, and the basic tinkering around.
If I where looking for something to run my business on I would want all of the piece of mind that come with brand new equipment.
You ask if all of the latest hardware would really matter. In my opinion at some point it would have to. Today's applications are getting bigger and demanding more compute and storage every day. Older hardware might be able to keep up for a little while but as the business demands grow you backend hardware might start to suffer as well. You mention that you are looking to move away from your current storage hardware. What is driving you to look at something different? Is it performance? Stability? Features? Or something else, what ever it is I would guess that new hardware would be your best option.
Hope this helps ...
yantiscompany
8 Posts
0
December 7th, 2011 08:00
I'm looking for better performance, and new features. We are currently in an EMC AX4, and EMC has not only discontinued the product, but any software upgrades or parts for expanding.
The used SAN I'm looking at seems to be plenty big for our company, with faster drives than we have now. It's upgraded to the newest software as well. For warranty and support, I figured I would buy a support contract? Does Dell offer support contracts on second hand equipment purchases?
I simply want to make sure I make the best decision possible considering the current economic climate. If I can buy this used system and get support on it, then it would save my company a lot of money. As long as the controller is able to support the new drive enclosures that support SAS and SSD drives, then I would think it's performance would be quite scalable. In the future beyond that, I'm sure I could probably purchase new controllers and then use them with the already established drive enclosures. Offsite DR is also another possibility.