Warning: I am not soliciting service providers!

I tried the search in the offer section, but "SAN" matches so many things, including San Francisco and other "San" prefixed cities :)

What I am wondering is if there is a service such as dedicated server with a smaller disk, but with mountable SAN network disks? Are there data centres providing such services?

I'm specifically looking for an almost "cloud-like" solution. Where the SAN space is transparent to me and virtually unlimited. Of course, I understand that unlimited is impossible, that is why I say "virtually". And the SAN provides redundancy itself (RAID) without intervention from the server side.

If there are places offering such services, what should I be looking for? What are the products and/or industry keywords?

Are there any potential performance issues with such setups? For example, if I were to store VPS images on such storage device, would it impact performance for reads/writes?

I assume you've looked into solutions like amazon s3?

I know of a few that do, but it's relatively uncommon. Look at larger companies like The Planet and RackSpace - they have storage you can consume over the network.

What you'll find far more commonly is competently operated 'closed box' dedicated SANs. I can't imagine a service provider wouldn't offer and manage something like this for you if you were an existing customer and wanted to pay them more.

I think joe's DC provides mountable SAN storage.

A lot of people can offer you SAN. The question is, what kind of SAN ...

There are data centers that provide dedicated servers with access to a data center provided SAN service.

In terms of industry keywords you should probably be looking for would be:
- Gigabit unmetered internal network
- iSCSI or NFS SAN storage
- RAID-10 or RAID-6
- 15Krpm SAS or 7.2Krpm SATA
- SSD caching

What exactly you should be looking for should depend on the type of work-load you expect. Do your systems tend to do reads or writes? Do your systems tend to have random I/O or sequential?

The types of specifications for a central logging server will tend to be different from a MySQL server used for an active forum. Some SANs have both a RAID-10 and RAID-6 arrays where a customer can select to have space allocated on one or the other or both. A logging server should work better on a RAID-10 array of 15Krpm SAS drives. A MySQL based web forum may benefit more from SSD and RAM caching even if it's on top of RAID-6 of 7.2Krpm drives.

There are always potential performance issues with using a SAN depending on your needs. In terms of use with a VPS, some VPS vendors have "certified" SAN configurations for doing live migrations. There are several non-certified configurations which may also work for doing live migrations but several VPS software vendors will point out that uncertified configurations are unsupported. If having official support for live migrations is critical then you may want to work with the VPS software vendor in selecting a DC SAN solution.

Aside from the special case of performing live migrations, the same rules apply of knowing the type of work load would help in providing the best cost/performance SAN configuration.

Do a google search on SAN hosting, SAN to SAN replication.

Dell equal logic replication hosting or even dell equal logic hosting.

There are a small number of providers offering this service.

Some very comments above that may help look for a provider.

I guess a key question would be, do they have replication of their san environment in a separate center or at least dr for their primary san?

Good luck

A lot of providers who are offering cloud hosting would be able to offer you SAN storage, just contact them for more info.

Generally people look for SAN's for two reasons:

1. Extra Disk Space (scalable to your needs)

2. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

Prices will vary amongst providers with the different types of SAN's out there like EMC2, HP, Dell Equal Logic, and so on.

Hope that helps you out

We asked our current ISP about this and they were able to provide a monthly rental on a SAN..albeit expensive.

What sort of san did they rent you? An actual SAN or a volume?

An actual SAN plus attached servers, we did discuss using NetApp.

I would have more info but unfortuantely we have postponed the project for the forseeable future.

Definitely check with your existing ISP particularly if you enjoy a good relationship with them they may be able to offer over and above services.

there are many SAN provider, better you should contact to those provider whom has proving cloud hosting and vmware hosting. Many data center provides you such SAN hosting

Dedicate Lime (http://www.dedicatedlime.com/) offers pretty nice HP ProLiant servers connected to SAN (300GB - 1TB plans). If the SAN is also of enterprise quality, I guess that makes for a pretty good setup. Unfortunately, they're over my budget...

Hello. And Bye.

What are you going to be using the space for Ex: Backup, File Sharing, Database, WebServer ?

Because what you are looking for really depends on what you are using it for. The throughput it needs to be able to handle.