HP Windows Storage Server Replacement

[boydbischke]

My company has a dilemma that I am not well equipped to handle. I'm hoping some storage experts here could lend a hand.

We have purchased an HP EVA4400 SAN. We share a portion of that san using NAS (NFS/CIFS) with an HP Windows Storage Server solution. Most of the servers in our environment are Solaris, but a few are Windows.

We have the following problems with the HP solution:
-It is currently not configured in a highly available fashion, and therefore represents a single point of failure.
-We periodically run into strange permission issues. We attribute this to how the Windows Storage Servers map from Windows Permissions to Unix Permissions.
-We have had some compatibility issues with NFSv4.
-The setup is overly complex, requiring us to run NIS and Active Directory, which we otherwise would not.

We are going to get rid of this Windows Storage Server solution and replace it with something that will operate more seamlessly? Could somebody offer suggestions for a solution that would meet the following criteria:

-Straightforward to set up
-Offers high availability (clustering between two of these solutions)
-Shares NFS and CIFS
-Can connect into HP EVA4400 SAN
-Performs reasonably well
-Costs less than $30k for two production servers/filers and one DR server/filers.

I would probably prefer a preconfigured appliance, but would be open to a software solution.

Thanks so much for any guidance you can provide.

[ua549]

Have you looked into migrating the Windows Storage Server to a different operating system?
I believe HP supports several operating systems on that line of products.
Then an additional unit can be added to eliminate the single point of failure.

[boydbischke]

Thanks for your reply.

They are just X86 boxes, so presumably we could just install Linux or Solaris X86 and set up NFS ourselves. We would probably have to use a Linux HA or Solaris X86 Cluster OS.

My concern with this solution is:
-it would be unsupported if we had problems
-with so much manual configuration it could be prone to admin error
-the performance may not be in the same range as a something like a NetApp filer

Ideally I would like to buy some NetApp filers to hook into our SAN, but they are very expensive. Ultimately, if I can't come up with something better I may need to fall back to this "custom" solution, but I am hoping somebody can propose a few mid-range vendor options.

[boydbischke]

ua549,

Yeah to be more specific, the particular HP solution we bought has no HP software on it. It's simply Microsoft Windows Storage Edition with Service for Unix.

We should check with HP to see if they have other product lines they will upgrade us to or something.