August 16th, 2010
I awoke early this morning to an email at the top of my inbox from one of my analyst buddies, “Call when you can to discuss the Dell/3Par deal…” …OK…Wait…what?! I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was reading it right, gulped the rest of my coffee and gave him a ring.
So, yeah…Dell has agreed to acquire 3Par for ballpark of $1.15billion…Billion with a “B”. Seems high to me what what do I know about company valuations. Maybe someone else was bidding on them too..
This is interesting for a number of reasons not the least of which is the further strain it puts on Dell’s already-rocky (despite what they say in the press) relationship with EMC. First, Dell buys EqualLogic for $1.6billion, and in doing so adds a major competitor to EMC to their product offering…Both parties shrug it off to the media but if you’re a fan of logic (and who isn’t!) that was a HUGE gut-punch to EMC from essentially their largest partner. Now they add a large-scale, high-end virtualized storage line and the hand-holding and nervous smiles they display when seen in public together don’t hold much water. This relationship is on the rocks…It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
Anyway….As a long-time EqualLogic and Dell Partner we welcome the opportunity to offer 3Par to our customers and think this is a great move by Dell.
Please give us a shout if you’d like to discuss further and/or get technical/pricing info on 3Par.
Posted in Fibre Channel, Large Scale Storage, SAN, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
June 10th, 2010
Dell-EqualLogic just took the wraps off 2 new arrays: the PS-6000XVS and PS-6010XVS
Those familiar with Dell’s naming convention will recognize that the 6000XVS is a mix of eight 15k SAS (XV) and eight Solid State Drives (S) in a single 3U chassis….and the PS-6010XVS is the 10-Gig iSCSI variant.
The systems have the intelligence to autonomously watch IO loads and distribute data to the most appropriate tier withing the chassis….very cool for tiered scenarios (virtual desktops come to mind as a big one)
Contact us for more info or if you’d like to see pricing
Posted in SAN, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
May 13th, 2010
Dell’s EqualLogic line of virtualized line of iSCSI arrays are the industry leader for a number of reasons. Their overall value, performance, ease of use and breadth of deep features are some of the top reasons they beat the competition on a daily basis.
In fact, the line offers so many features that many times folks simply don’t put all of them to best use. Case in Point: their AutoSnapshot Manager series of host-side apps. These no-extra-cost apps sit on the host machines and tie them directly into the SAN’s snapshot engine, allowing application managers the ability to manage how their environments are backed up. They come in flavors for MS SQL, Exchange and VMware.
Click the below graphic to see a video going over the MS Exchange version…pretty slick stuff. And a feature a lot of EqualLogic customers don’t use.
Let us know if you;d like to discuss this or any other Dell-EqualLogic feature in further detail or if you go over hoe this product might fit your organization.
More info here.
Posted in Disaster Recovery, SAN, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
April 23rd, 2010
Dell-EqualLogic has just announced support for 2TB SATA drives in their PS-6500E and PS-6510E (10Gig variant) virtualized iSCSI arrays, giving them a raw capacity of 96TB in only 4U of rackspace.
More info: www.scaledatacom.com/equallogic
Posted in Large Scale Storage, SAN, Virtualization, iSCSI | 1 Comment »
March 3rd, 2010
I’ve said it before and, well, I’ll say it again: Nexsan is on a tear. They’ve recently announced support in their SATA/SASboy and SATA/SASbeast line of arrays for Solid-State Drives (SSD)….this comes just on the heels of support for 2TB SATA in the Beast line.
So, the Beast (4U, 42-bay) and Boy (3U, 14-bay) arrays can now support SATA, 15krpm SAS and SSD’s. Add their AutoMAID power-saving feature and you’ve got the building blocks for a very robust, dense and power-efficient tiered storage platform….which can scale out to 8PB using their DATAbeast virtualization controllers.
If you’d like more info on Nexsan, please give us a shout.
Posted in Backup, Fibre Channel, Green Storage, Large Scale Storage, SAN, iSCSI | 2 Comments »
December 14th, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have announced 10Gigabit variants of their entire 6000 and 6500 Series of PeerStorage arrays. Dubbed the 6010 (16-bay) and 6510 (48-bay) they feature 2 x 10GbE ports per controller and support multipath for load balancing and failover.
This essentially removes what fibre channel vendors have been pitching forever as their trump card: bandwidth. If you’ve put up with FC’s compatibility issues, high price and learning curve simply to get more lanes of traffic, your time to switch has come.
…and because its an EqualLogic, you can rest assured these new arrays are 100% compatible with every other array they’ve ever made.
Give us a shout if you’d like any info or pricing (pricing of the 6510 won’t be available until January)
Posted in Disaster Recovery, Large Scale Storage, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
October 1st, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have just announced a variant of their popular 6500E array: the 6500X
The 6500X is a 4U chassis with 48 x 600GB 10k rpm SAS drives giving you it total raw capacity of 28.8TB of raw performance. As always, it is 100% cross compatible w/ all other EqualLogic arrays and introduces a very dense tier for performance-intensive applications.
Contact us today for pricing or further technical info.
Our Dell-EqualLogic mini-site
Posted in Large Scale Storage, Virtualization, iSCSI | No Comments »
September 29th, 2009
Dell-EqualLogic have recently released firmware v4.2 for their PS Series of virtualized iSCSI SAN arrays. As always, it is compatible w/ every array ever made and includes some cool improvements.
The big one: support for 16-member groups. This means you can have any mix of 16 arrays in a single SAN all sharing their disks, cache, processing power and thruput. Using the big-boy PS-6500E’s, that gives you a max capacity of 768TB. Who else does this? Oh yeah, no one…
They’ve also improved upon some things like RAID reconstruction performance and Solid State Drive support as well as added SNMP v3.
If you’d like to discuss if this new rev is right for your environment or are considering EqualLogic for a current/future project, please give us a shout.
Posted in Disaster Recovery, Virtualization, iSCSI | 1 Comment »
September 18th, 2009
We’re just getting back from Nexsan’s NexStep Expo in Las Vegas and 2 things are clear: our wallets are a little lighter now thanks to the craps table and Nexsan is on a major roll .
Here at Scale Datacom, we see a lot of storage technology from various vendors and when the dust settles there are really only a handful of vendors that we can honestly say are innovating…an Nexsan is definitely one of them.
Nexsan has a rule of not letting too many details out of the bag w/ regards to future products, but the ones we saw were amazing..and we don;t use that word all that much.
I think I’m safe in saying you will definitely see more of what they do best: density.
With the recent qualification of 2TB SATA drives in their SATAbeast and SASbeast arrays, you can now fit an amazing 84TB in only 4U of rackspace and dole it out via iSCSI and Fibre Channel as the controllers can handle both protocols simultaneously.
There are 1 or 2 other LARGE (wink wink) announcements that will coming in the near future, but safe to say, if you are considering Nexsan or currently have it installed you are partnering with one of the industries true leaders in the SAN storage space.
Get all the details at our Nexsan Mini-Site
Posted in Backup, Fibre Channel, Green Storage, Large Scale Storage, iSCSI | 2 Comments »
August 12th, 2009
Now that most top-tier vendors are including support for solid-state drives (SSD), the question of whether or not to use them in projects is starting to crop up more and more. “Is it worth the money?” “How much faster will it be than what we have now?” “Will our apps make use of them?” etc…
SearchStorage has a good article on best practices for solid-state drives. If you’re thinking/planning on using SSD in your environment its probably a good idea to check it out.
Article here
Posted in Fibre Channel, iSCSI | 2 Comments »