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.
The blogosphere has been alight these past months with discussions and rants about the “impending war” between iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)…Who will win, what will it mean for the industry and where should customers put their IT budgets. Add to this Data Center Ethernet (DCE), Fibre Channel pushing 8GB and 10GB iSCSI moving into the limelight.
Having been doing this for a while I’ve seen this movie a few times…different actors, same plot. The way I see it, FCoE is going to be a waste of time and money for most folks…iSCSI is mainstream, performs well, has a massive ecosystem and with 10GB iSCSI hitting its stride in 08/09, I don’t see FCoE being a viable solution. Those that bought HD-DVD players in the last year will relate: if the protocol doesn’t have massive support and industry inertia it’ll be money wasted and you’ll need to migrate to Blu-Ray the winner sooner or later.
So, let the vendors hack it out in the quest to buy their CEO’s even bigger yachts. Our pick is iSCSI. Unless you’ve got a significant investment in FC infra that you’d like to stretch for another couple of years, from what we’ve seen iSCSI is the way to go. FCoE will wind up on clearance cart along w/ Titanic HD-DVDs.
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.
Compellent is running on methanol these days folks (for non-car-guys: thats a good thing). Their solid technology and rich feature set are winning customers and industry accolades left and right.
Best SAN of 2008 - InfoWorld
Midrange SAN Quality Award 2008 - Diogenes Labs / Storage Magazine
Green 15 Award 2008 - InforWorld
Storage Product of the Year 07 Finalist - SearchStorage
Excellence Award 2007 - eWeek
Their Storage Center software platform and robust, flexible hardware are truly bringing their mantra “The only SAN so sophisticated its simple” to the masses with rave reviews. Their Remote Replication and Data Instant Replay (aka: Snapshots) features are among the best out there and are extremely easy to use.
The R&D groups at EMC, NetApp, Hitachi et al are no doubt burning the midnite oil to combat this relatively new and powerful threat to the midrange fibre world….oh and also they do iSCSi and NAS quite well thank you very much.
Exagrid announced on Tuesday (aka my birthday) that they are bringing to market the world’s first data deduplication gateway for iSCSI storage. The creatively named ‘Exagrid iSCSI De-Deuplication Gateway’ will cut back storage requirements for backup by 10:1 to as much as 50:1, while promising a 30-90% reduction in backup and restore times.
And since we’re talking about iSCSI, can you guess who they’re marketing this heavily with? One guess….Yup: EqualLogic. De-Dupe has been on our wish list w/ EqualLogic for some time now and this new partnership with Exagrid, one of the clear leaders in the field, fulfills that wish.
If you currently have or are planning on implementing a Dell/EqualLogic PeerStorage SAN and intend to use it for disk backup, this gateway is worth a serious look.
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.
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.
StoreVault’s “little array that could” S500 is all grown up and now offers support for 750GB and 1TB SATA drives. Now known as the S550, it betters the previous S500’s 250GB and 500GB drive support, giving it a max raw capacity of 12TB now.
The S550 and its little, desktop-residing brother the S300 are perfect storage solutions for small to medium businesses: they can do SAN and NAS in the same box and offer the flexibility iSCSI and fibre connectivity. And because they’re a division of NetApp, they also offer a tweaked version of their award-winning DataONTAP storage operating system with features like snapshots and remote replication.
Another feature (and a very smart moev by NetApp) that makes these StoreVault boxes cool is their ability to replicate not only to other StoreVault arrays but to larger NetApp FAS arrays. This basically making these little guys gateway arrays to bring smaller organizations into the NetApp fold at an earlier stage in their lifecycle.
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.
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.
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