Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

EqualLogic’s blogger extraordinaire Marc Farley has posted a great video on his Storage @ Work blog of their Director of Product Management, Eric Schott, explaining how their remote replication works.

Click here for the video

In keeping with their corporate mantra “simplifying networked storage”, EqualLogic’s remote replication implementation is truly incredible because of its simplicity and as well as performance. If you have remote site data that you’d like to centralize or are thinking of implementing a disaster recovery plan, EqualLogic’s PeerStorage iSCSI SAN arrays have the features, horsepower and reliability to be the backbone of your disk storage needs.

Contact us today if you’d like to discuss EqualLogic’s products/features in further detail. Or try our new EqualLogic Quote Generator

Everyone’s favorite iSCSI SAN vendor has just released their latest and greatest firmware rev: v3.2.0.  This new version builds upon EqualLogic already rock-solid feature set and adds a few new tricks, like Thin Provisioning and an enhanced remote replication implementation….and becasue its EqualLogic, all new features are free of charge to existing customers.

The coolest feature is an updated replication feature.  In the past it was recommended that both arrays be in the same location for the initial replication as the first dump is the largest.   This worked well for most folks but was an inconvenience for folks w/ a lot of remote sites as well as folks w/ arrays overseas.  The new manual replication feature allows the initial replica of a volume to be transferred to the secondary group location by physical media instead of over a network connection.  Manual replication is ideal for cases where the network used for replication meets the performance requirements for ongoing replication operations, but is insufficient for the initial data transfer of the entire volume.

Get yours today at the EqualLogic Customer Service Home, or contact us for a copy.

Everyone is looking at virtualization these days. And those that aren’t aren’t because they already have it. VMware…The undisputed king of server virtualization (and new Scale Datacom Partner!) is doing it part across this great land to help IT organizations save time and money by greatly increasing the efficiency and flexibility of their server hardware assets. So, you’re considering VM’ing your server environment…or you’ve just VM’ed it. Now what? One word: storage.

Going with a virtualized disk storage platform affords you the same budget savings and operational agility that VMware does on the server side. Another partner of ours, EqualLogic, offers full virtualization on all their iSCSI SAN arrays and is a perfect compliment to a VMware environment.

EqualLogic’s ability to scale capacity (from 1-168TB), mix, match and reallocate RAID sets, disks types, speeds, and sizes on the fly all in a completely redundant, enterprise-class environment insures that your organization will be ready as its data storage requirements change.

Here’s an overview PDF

Let us know if you’d like to discuss how virtualized storage (or servers) can help you.

Being from New England I like to write about hometown happening and this is a big one. EqualLogic has just added New England Cable News to its list of >3000 happy customers.

If you live outside New England (or don’t own a TV), New England Cable News is monster of a company. They are the largest regional news network in the US and reach 3.6million homes. They had outgrown their direct-attached storage and were feeling the pain big time with respect to management, backup operations, scalability and DR possibilities. They did their due diligence and looked at both Fiber and iSCSI solutions from EMC, LeftHand Networks, EqualLogic and HP and in the end chose EqualLogic for a number of reasons: performance, flexbility, ease of remote replication and management.
Here’s the write up.

If you’re considering a SAN solution and would like to discuss which SAN fabric and vendor would be the best choice for your environment, just give us a shout.

Nice article on ComputerWorld.com about how business continuity solutions in the mid market are affordable options now. Things we love like constant data protection (CDP), Windows VSS and our friends at EqualLogic are all named as budget-friendly ways to keep your business up in the face of disaster.

With technology constantly improving and prices continually coming down, rock-solid yet affordable business continuity solutions are now within the budgets of most small to midsized organizations.
Give us a shout today if you’d like to discuss business continuity solutions for your organization. From CDP, snapshots, and remote replication to disk-based backup and accelerated wide-area data services we can help tailor a solution that meets your needs and budget.

If faster is better for storage area networks (SAN), 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) is the next logical step up. It is beginning to arrive, but it is still definitely in the early adopter stage.

10 GigE is defined under the 802 standard (802.ae) and uses the same MAC protocol, frame sizes and format as regular Ethernet. However, unlike the older versions, it doesn’t rely on the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detect protocol (CSMA/CD) to prevent network contention because all connections are full duplex.

Ultimately, the promise of Ethernet iSCSI SANs is integration. By using Ethernet for LANs, WAN and storage area networks (SAN), companies theoretically can simplify infrastructures, improve management and reduce costs. While some companies are moving in that direction, the effort has been hindered by the fact that the current standard is 1 GigE, which is much too slow for many applications.  …more

Source: Rick Cook - 8/8/07 - SearchStorage

…so is 10Gig iSCSI going to be the “gotta have it” technology in 2008?   We have heard rumblings from a few folks that are drooling over it but honestly, we’re not seeing that much pent up demand for it in most enterprises.  Most iSCSI arrays (at least the ones we resell) are well-balanced in that they have a reasonable amount of ports for the # of disks in the array.  Simply making those ports 10x’s larger may not do a damn thing if the demands on the system aren’t that great.  The most important thin is that the system as a whole is balanced.  Number of disks, backplane speed, port count and size and network fabric outside of the arrays all play a role in determining a system’s performance.

So, the short answer is “it depends…”….but Fiber is quaking in its boots

You wouldn’t buy a Porsche just to go grocery shopping, and you wouldn’t top off the gas tank just for a spin across town. However, storage professionals overbuy both performance and capacity in an effort to forestall potential storage problems. Tiered storage is one way to address this problem — matching storage resources and costs with the value of data. Today, storage is poised to build on this notion with application-aware storage, using business policies to bring autonomy and intelligence to enterprise storage. Still, there is a great deal of confusion surrounding this technology, its capabilities and its deployment. This article considers the main ideas of application-aware storage, its benefits and limitations, and examines typical deployments as it looks ahead to the future. …more

Source: Stephen Bigelow - 8/7/07 - SearchStorage

Give us a shout today if you’d like to discuss how application-aware storage can help you make the most effective use of your budget and resources.

Nearly halfway through 2007, storage managers have made up their minds on the merits of data deduplication technology.

“I wouldn’t buy a secondary storage device today that doesn’t have it,” said Michael Thomas, storage architect with the Federal Reserve Bank, at a recent Storage Decisions conference.

It’s easy to see why. The latest virtual tape libraries (VTL), which include data deduplication as a feature, claim to offer users as much as a 50-to-1 reduction in storage footprint by deduplicating redundant backup data. The savings in cost per gigabyte stored can be huge.  …more

Source:  Jo Maitland - SearchStorage - 6/1/07

Contact us if you’d like to discuss Data De-Duping in further detail.

Clackamas County uses EqualLogic SAN to consolidate storage for Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange and PeopleSoft, and implements disaster recovery. …more (PDF)

Give us a shout if you’d like to see how iSCSI and EqualLogic stack up against fiber channel.

APC’s cool new NetBotz series of network-accessible surveillance appliances help you keep an eye on anything that needs an eye kept on it: from small wiring closets to an entire data center. The integrated cameras on the Surveillance models enable rapid search and retrieval of footage as well as tagging footage for later review. The Environmental models monitor the full breadth of environmental variable, like motion, temperature, audio, air flow and humidity. This data can be encrypted for security and sent to a central management console, workstation or your Palm or Blackberry.

Contact us if you’d like to see more info or pricing on these cool new monitoring tools.