storage SAN

Have you seen the latest?  Storage Magazine ranked Dell the #1 midrange array provider in service and reliability.  With our acquisition of EqualLogic, we turned last-year’s 9^th place ranking into a #1 ranking in product reliability and initial product quality.  Hopefully, you didn’t miss Dell’s other recent achievement where Gartner recognized Dell as a leader in Midrange Disk Arrays for their Magic Quadrant 2008.

Dell has made a tradition out of listening to you, our customers.  In turn, you’ve rewarded us with your support.  We’re excited to be plugged in, so we can keep building storage solutions you want.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

(editor's note - this comes to us from Tim Sherbak - one of our EqualLogic virtualization masters)

As you may have heard VMware recently introduced a new initiative they call vStorage.  In a nutshell, it’s all about making VMware work better with storage. Many of our readers are moving to virtual environments using VMware – and this has important storage implications. vStorage helps you integrate and automate solutions to manage and protect your data more efficiently. 

So, what are some examples?

Previously, we’ve talked about Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition (ASM/VE) and Site Recovery Manager for EqualLogic iSCSI arrays. One of our customers, Donald Wilkins from Navicure presented at VMworld breakout discussion highlighting SRM. Here is a webcast replay of similar material that we presented together just before the show.

Let’s talk about what’s coming.

At the show, we also demonstrated some additional vStorage-enabled features that we’re cooperatively developing with VMware but are not yet shipping to customers..things like the ability to offload the ESX server from data copy operations like Storage VMotion, creating a virtual machine from a template, or creating a clone of a virtual machine. Instead of copying data from the SAN to the ESX server and back to the SAN, the VMware Virtual Center sends instructions to the EqualLogic array as to what needs to be moved, and the arrays offload the data copying from the ESX servers to the arrays. The operation is faster and more efficient.  Here’s a quick demo that you can watch.

vStorage is also coming to the provisioning realm.  In the future you’ll see the coordination of thin provisioning management between the ESX servers and the EqualLogic arrays for protection of the workload in the case that the virtual machine were to run out of space. Here’s a quick demo.

And lastly, here’s a demo of linked clone technology hosted on a prototype EqualLogic 10GbE solid state disk (SSD) disk array.  Linked clones technology optimizes storage utilization by eliminating the duplicate storage inherent to multiple virtual machines. With the 10GbE SSD disk array, it means that we’re not only optimizing storage utilization but also insuring highest possible performance given the large number of virtual machines accessing the underlying shared virtual machine data.  Here’s another demo.

(editor's note - this post comes to us from Tony Ansley of Dell’s storage product group which will be supporting hands-on labs at SNW next week.)

 If you’re interested in what Dell is doing with enterprise storage, make every effort to get to Dallas (OK, Grapevine…) for the Computerworld Storage Networking World conference that is starting on October 13^th.  Please come by and see us in booth #400.

Here's a list of some of the things we'll be doing at the show:

• Agenda Session: Data Infrastructure Track: “Yes, Fibre Channel and iSCSI Can Co-Exist” by Praveen Asthana, Director of Dell Enterprise Storage and Networking (Monday Oct 13, 4:45)
• Hands-on-Labs (running all week), staffed by Dell product management, engineering and user experts
  • Establishing a Virtual Storage Environment – Get to experience the advanced features that make Dell EqualLogic PS Series SANs the best mid-range storage solution providing enterprise class features and true virtualized storage. 
  • Configuring IP SANs – Experience how easy it is to deploy and provision storage with iSCSI SAN solutions.  Both the MD3000i entry-level iSCSI AND the Dell EqualLogic mid-range SAN solution will be available.
  • Protecting and Securing Your Environment – Be the first to experience the PowerVault DL2000 - Dell’s new integrated disk-to-disk data protection solution.

In the Dell Booth#400

• Dell EqualLogic – See the latest PS Series array, the PS5500E that packs 48 TB into only 4U of rack space, and experience new Auto-Snapshot Manager software with VMware and Microsoft Exchange integrations and take a glimpse at technology demonstration of what’s possible in the future with SSD and 10Gig technologies in the EqualLogic family.
• Dell | EMC – check out the new CX4 with unprecedented flexibility in a SAN with UltraFlex Modular I/O which allows you to easily add more ports in both iSCSI and Fibre Channel
• Dell PowerVault MD Series – Find out what makes MD an ideal entry-level iSCSI storage solution
• Dell PowerVault DL2000 – See the latest in data protection from Dell with the new appliances powered by CommVault and Symantec Backup Exec software delivering integrated solutions for de-duplication and faster disk-based backup and recovery.

Also, while you're at the booth don’t forget to enter for your chance at winning a brand new Dell Inspiron Mini-9 laptop!

HP made an interesting move today with the intent to acquire LeftHand Networks. Obviously HP is coming to recognize what Dell did a long time ago – simple, intelligent, automated storage is what the mid-market wants.

That’s why we moved to buy EqualLogic almost a year ago. What really interested us was the ease-of-use, intelligence and automation of EqualLogic’s systems. That was a big advantage that others don’t have.

As an example, let’s look at investment protection: With EqualLogic, you can expand using the latest and greatest hardware regardless of the EqualLogic generation you initially purchased. Load balancing between unequal nodes on LeftHand’s architecture is a much different proposition.

We now offer full integration of EqualLogic into Dell servers – particularly blades - and application solutions, so we can help our customers manage and protect their data center growth.

It’s no secret that Dell is #1 in iSCSI SANS worldwide.

Looks like HP is playing catch up.

Lot's of virtualization news today. My guess is that most of our readers aren't asking "if" they should virtualize – the benefits from server virtualization and server consolidation are well-touted.

One by-product of moving to a virtual server environment is the near-mandate for shared storage.  That gives a great opportunity to assess your storage environment and try to get the same consolidation benefits for storage as you plan to achieve from server virtualization.

The undeniable reality is that IT departments are faced with growing storage requirements, and disparate islands of storage, whether server-attached DAS, NAS, FC SAN or traditional iSCSI SANs are hard to grow, protect (e.g. backup/replicate) and manage individually. So storage consolidation isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a real and necessary tactic to reduce the man-hours required for manual storage tasks, to cut power consumption and better protect critical business data. And chances are – you can do it at the same time you’re looking to virtualize.

With that in mind, today we launched the EqualLogic PS5500E, a new hugely-scalable virtualized iSCSI storage array and VMware ESX-integrated snapshots. The PS5500E is aimed squarely at consolidation. The unique storage virtualization and ease-of-use built into all Dell EqualLogic arrays help simplify the consolidation process by automatically handling many otherwise tedious administrative tasks for storage management.

Additionally, the PS5500E, in the context of a larger EqualLogic SAN, provides an easy and cost-effective way for many customers to begin tiering their data stores. In other words, put less frequently accessed application data on highly dense less-expensive, less power-hungry SATA storage pools and put more heavily hit Exchange, SQL and Oracle services on 10K rpm or 15K rpm SAS, but manage it all from a single intuitive SAN management interface. Of course take into account your virtual server workloads when determining your storage tiers; just like in a physical world, not all of your VMs will have equivalent I/O or capacity requirements.  Luckily with an EqualLogic SAN, you can migrate your volumes (and the VMs on them) between pools/tiers online if you want to change your initial configuration.

Check out this video from one of our storage strategists - Travis Vigil - explaining more about the PS5500E.