Scale Datacom’s Data Storage Blog

At long last, and after much fanfare, VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is finally here.  Given the buzz around this product, we get a lot of folks asking “This is gonna be so great!….now, exactly what does SRM do?”

In a nutshell: SRM takes the hassle out of validating and testing your disaster recovery plan. DR plans have historically been  complex and difficult to errect and test, often involving heroic levels of scripting and finger-crossing.  SRM removes that and is honestly a quantum leap in simplifying this once daunting part of IT.

SRM ties into compatible replication engines from most leading vendors (EqualLogic, EMC, NetApp etc..) and allows you to create a “recovery image” that includes VM’s, storage and network connections at a remote location and to autonomously switch over to that image in the event of a disaster.  It also allows you to segregate this environment, allowing you to freely test it to ensure your environment fails over correctly without fear of impacting production ops.

One thing to keep in mind: SRM does NOT replicate data.  That duty is still the responsibility of the SAN, so make sure your storage platform has the requisite storage adapter for SRM.  EqualLogic has a great SRM adapter and when coupled with their excellent replication engine, creates a bulletproof DR platform.

If you’d like to see a demo of VMware’s SRM and EqualLogic  in action, simply let us know.

This video illustrates one of the big differentiators of Dell-EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays: simplicity.

The clip takes you from populating the hard drives in a chassis to setting up the SAN, creating a data volume and mounting it to a server.  Its sped up in the interest of time but so is the stopwatch keeping time so its entirely accurate….as are the not-so-subtle digs at HP thruout. Warning: the music is annoying.

If you’d like to schedule a Dell-EqualLogic online demo like this just drop us a line.

RELDATA’s 9240 storage gateway is a very cool piece of data storage gear for a number of reasons that we think businesses will find attractive.

Typically, when you want to look at an enterprise-class storage solution you had a list of usual suspects: NetApp, EMC, Compellent, HP, EqualLogic etc…and they all do a bang-up job (some better than others quite frankly). But they all require you to buy the actual disks from them….at seemingly ludicrous prices. $1495 for a 750GB SATA Drive???

Like the $5000 toilet bowl seats the government has been buying for years, these high drive prices are one place where these companies pay for their R&D budgets…everyone knows the drives aren’t special. Its a $250 Seagate w/ maybe some firmware and a fancy drive sled but thats it.

RELDATA takes a different approach: sure they offer disk trays to back their 9240 storage gateways, but you don’t HAVE to buy them (altho they are a lot more budget-friendly than most). They are hardware-agnostic and extremely flexible: you can attach Fibre, SCSI or iSCSI disk from virtually anyone to the backend. You can even mix new storage with systems you currently own for investment protection and centralized management.

RELDATA then takes all this storage, virtualizes it and doles it out as iSCSI and/or NAS to your users and apps. And because we’re talking options here, they allow you to do it over Gigabit or 10Gigabit links. And its all bolstered by enterprise-class snapshot, remote replication and multi-path I/O features.

The savings in backend storage options, the ability to use existing disk and the flexibility to provision it out as block and file-level data is only the first half of the movie. Its also SCREAMING FAST. Each 9240 has dual Xeon CPU’s, up to 16GB DRAM and you can active-active cluster up to 32 of them. Simply put: you will never outgrow this solution, from either a performance or capacity standpoint.

We write in this blog a fair bit about EqualLogic’s technology and why its so special. But given that a picture is worth a thousand words, I think it’d be better to show you. We do a lot of these WebEx demos for prospective customers and most of them are blown away at the ease with which an EqualLogic SAN can be admin’ed (especially if they’ve dealt with EMC in the past).

So, I’m opening it up to any folks out there that may be thinking of implementing an iSCSI SAN in the near future. We’ve got an EqualLogic array here and we’ll run thru a WebEx demo to show you how the SAN is setup, config’ed and go over all of their award-winning features. If you’re considering an EMC CX3, NetApp FAS, LeftHand or any other midrange iSCSI SAN, you should take a look at this.

Click this link to schedule an EqualLogic WebEx Demo Today!

As a long-standing Certified Partner of EqualLogic’s I can honestly say we here at Scale Datacom were more than a little concerned when Dell announced their acquisition intentions. Dell had a well-earned reputation for treating resellers, how you say, poorly. We sat in on con-calls w/ EqualLogic and Dell folks where they pledged up and down that we partners would continue to be the backbone of their sales efforts on the EqualLogic line and they looked forward to a long and prosperous relationship bla bla bla…. we rolled our eyes and braced for the worst.

But the worst never came…

Turns out they are doing exactly what they said they would. We have been welcomed with open arms and are actively engaged with the Dell Sales folks at all levels working as a united team to make sure all our customers are taken care of and prospective customers get the technical information and great pricing they deserve. We are winning new customers left and right as a united team and for the first few weeks I found myself trying to slap myself out of what I was sure was a dream.

Scale Datacom’s extensive technical and competitive knowledge on the product and professional services coupled with Dell’s economies of scale in manufacturing and distribution have truly created a dream team that offers much more value than I could’ve imagined.

At the end of the day its about getting our customers the best iSCSI SAN for the best value and I can honestly say that our new and improved Dell/EqualLogic partnership is helping us do exactly that.

More on the product and quote request: www.scaledatacom.com/equallogic

The midnite oil has been burning at Dell / EqualLogic since the acquisition was announced and today we saw the first in what will surely be a big year of product rollouts from the newly married couple.

Announced today, the PS5000 Series of iSCSI arrays are a rename in some cases and an upgrade in others. Here’s the rundown:

• PS5000E Series - these 16-bay SATA arrays will be replacing EqualLogic’s 14-bay SATA boxes (aka: 100E, 300E, 400E). They also add a model populated with 1TB drives now.
• PS5000X - Just a rebadged PS3700X - 6.4TB of 10k SAS goodness
• PS5000XV - Rebadged PS3900XV - 4.8TB of 15k SAS

Dell has thankfully left EqualLogic’s all-inclusive software licensing policy in place: the price of the array includes all software features (and there are a lot of them).

If you’d like technical, competitive or pricing info on any of these arrays, or would like to schedule a WebEx to see the technology in action (its imressive), just let us know.

More info and quote request form  here.

If you’re a midrange SAN vendor in today’s market you need to offer some form of remote replication….and they all do. Given that, what makes one vendor’s implementation stand out over everyone else’s?

The goals are simple enough: offer fast, bandwidth-friendly replications that can be easily validated, don’t require a team from NASA to administer and can be quickly rolled over to in the event of a disaster.

However, most implementations are kludgy, full of gotcha’s and require massive amounts of professional services to erect and maintain. Compellent’s Remote Data Instant Replay on the other hand, is different.

Hows this for a dream-team of features:

• Data De-Deplication
• Synchronous and Asynchronous Implementations
• Pre-Circuit Bandwidth Simulator
• Comprehensive Bandwidth Shaping - down to the volume level
• Ability to store replicas on different disk tiers and RAID sets to reduce cost
• Replicate using Fibre or iSCSI
• Replication / Failover Validation - Test your DR plan w/out bringing your environment down!

There are more but you get the picture. Ask your current SAN vendor (unless its Compellent) if they can do 1/2 of these things. Having done our research I can say their answer will most likely be no.

If you’re considering remote replication and would like to hear more about Compellent’s solution, please drop us a line to discuss further.

Our Compellent Mini-Site

One of the standout features in Compellent’s long list of great features is their Data Progression. What it does is autonomously classify and move data at the block level between tiers of storage based on frequency of use.

This has several benefits, all of them big:

• Save money by storing inactive data on cheaper, larger capacity drives
• Improve the overall SAN performance by keeping only high-traffic data on the faster drives
• Reduce administrative overhead by doing all of this autonomously - no intervention required

Surprisingly, most midrange SAN’s out there do not do this out of the box like Compellent; usually requiring either manual transfer of data between tiers or a 3rd party software layer which adds cost and complexity.

More info can be found on our Compellent Mini-Site

We’ve always had a good iSCSI SAN solution for our customers (read:EqualLogic) but have never had a true enterprise-class EMC-killer solution on the fibre side…until now.

Scale Datacom is very proud to announce that we are now a Compellent Business Partner and able to offer our customers Compellent’s entire line of award-winning virtualized SAN products.

The nice thing about Compellent is that their solution does it all: Fibre and iSCSI SAN as well as NAS in a single, easy-admin environment. Also, in addition to enterprise features like snapshots, thin provisioning and remote replication, Compellent also offers the ability to automatically migrate data across different storage tiers while data remains online. This ensures that your data is on the most performance and cost-appropriate hardware and makes Compellent a great choice for everything from MS Exchange and SQL to VMware and Web Operations.

Their recent win as InfoWorld’s “Best SAN of the Year 2008″ is further proof that this company has got a product that offers great performance, easy of use and value.

Contact us today to discuss if Compellent is the right solution for your needs.

And check out our new Compellent Mini-Site for more info on this exciting solution.

Boy is this getting old…or is it? Like our beloved New England Patriots, EqualLogic can do wrong these days. InfoWorld has voted EqualLogic “Best iSCSI SAN of the Year” for 2008. They are going to need a larger mantle for all their trophies.

Full press release here…

Yet another feather in their cap and further validation that the architecture path they’ve charted is the best for high-performance, feature-rich iSCSI SAN’s.

Let us know if you’d like to discuss how EqualLogic’s line of virtualized iSCSI SAN’s can help your organization.