Cheapest iSCSI SAN for Windows 2008/SQL Server clustering?

Posted by MichaelGG on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by MichaelGG
Published on 2009-05-10T22:15:20Z Indexed on 2010/04/14 23:43 UTC
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Are there any production-quality iSCSI SANs suitable for use with Windows Server 2008/SQL Server for failover clustering?

So far, I've only seen Dell's MD3000i, and HP's MSA 2000 (2012i), which both are around $6K with a minimal disk configuration. Buffalo (yea, I know), has a $1000 device with iSCSI support, but they say it will not work for 2008 failover clustering.

I'm interested in seeing something suitable for failover in a production environment, but with very low IO requirements. (Clustering, say, a 30GB DB.)

As for using software: On Windows, StarWind seems to have a great solution. But it's actually more money than buying a hardware SAN. (As I understand, only the enterprise edition supports having replicas, and that's $3000 a license.)

I was thinking I could use Linux, something like DRBD + an iSCSI target would be fine. However, I haven't seen any free or low-cost iSCSI software that supports SCSI-3 persistent reservations, which Windows 2008 needs for failover clustering.

I know $6K isn't much at all, just curious to see if there are practical cheaper solutions out there. And finally, yes, the software is expensive, but many small business get MS BizSpark, so the Windows 2008 Enterprise / SQL 2008 licenses are completely free.

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