Inside Enterprise IT : iSCSI

Michael Dell Paints His Vision of the Efficient Enterprise at Oracle OpenWorld

DELL-Greg W — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:47:00 GMT

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
Cool products, including:
- Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
- He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
- Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
- Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
- Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
- Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth.

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

Dell Launches More Servers, New EqualLogic Arrays, New Services

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:05:00 GMT

I won't cover it all here but be sure to click over to our blogging mothership, Direct2Dell, to read about Dell's Fast Track to Efficiency, the theme for Dell's announcement of a slew of new servers, a cool new EqualLogic array for small business and remote offices, and quite a few different services.

We'll also be hosting a webcast today with a number of Dell executives outlining the importance of these announcements and the impact to our customers. Following that webcast, my colleagues at Dell TechCenter will be hosting a live technical chat.

Take a look.

Adding SSD to the EqualLogic Line

DELL-Dylan L — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:02:00 GMT

With declining memory prices and increasing application performance requirements, Solid State Drive technology has re-emerged as a topic of great interest in the IT industry. Most recently, enterprise-class versions of the technology have been appearing in midrange storage arrays, including the Dell|EMC Clariion CX series and Dell's EqualLogic PS Series.

We had Travis Vigil in Dell’s Enterprise Product Group spend a little time to explain the basics around Solid State Drives and how they are being used in the new EqualLogic PS6000S array.

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In the video, Travis references some tests the Dell Storage and Oracle Solutions teams did to show how the addition of a PS6000S array could improve transactional throughput or response time.

More details on those tests can be found in this white paper entitled "Benefits and Best Practices for Deploying SSDs in an OLTP Environment Using Dell EqualLogic PS Series."

Enjoy.

Dell storage #1 in service and reliability - Storage Magazine

david_graves — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

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.

VMware vStorage Is Here….What Does It Mean?

david_graves — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:45:00 GMT

( 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...(read more)

The Storage World Descends on Dallas - SNW Fall 2008

david_graves — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

(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/LeftHand Meet Dell EqualLogic

david_graves — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:25:00 GMT

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.

VMworld's Around the Corner - What's Dell Got?

david_graves — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:25:00 GMT

(editor's note - this post comes to us courtesy of Tim Sherbak, one of our virtualization gurus)

The VMworld show is next week in Las Vegas and we'll be there in a big way. We'll be there to show solutions highlighting data protection, disaster recovery, consolidation, virtual desktops, and systems management. We’ve got a series of live demos in the booth including a full VMware environment built from our new blade and rack servers and the new Dell EqualLogic PS5500E. We’ll be demonstrating VMware Site Recovery Manager as well as the new Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition, Blade Server Management, Chassis System Controller and our OpenManage system management tools.

In addition, we’ve got some exceptionally innovative technology demos that VMware and Dell engineering have put together.

Some of the new products we'll have there include the new quad core M905* blade and 4 socket 6 core R900* rack Power Edge servers, Dell EqualLogic PS5500E, Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition, our integration with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, the Dell | EMC CX4, our on-demand desktop streaming (ODDS) and virtual remote desktop (VRD) solutions. We’re even raffling off a couple of new Dell Latitude E laptops to some lucky attendees.

Here’s a few of the breakout sessions that Dell is participating in or contributed content to and gives you an idea of some of the areas of our focus and energy.

Dell Keynote Presentation: The Intelligent, Automated IT Infrastructure (KNDell)
Managing Power and Cooling with Virtualization (PO2514)
Server and Storage Sizing Best Practices for VMware VDI (VD2505)
Planning and Implementing Simple, Affordable, Automated Disaster Recovery Through Dell | Virtualization Solution (BC2512)
Operational Readiness – Truth and Fiction (PO2535)
Fulfilling Regulatory Requirements in the Healthcare Industry Using VMware Virtualized Infrastructure (BC2411)
VM-Aware Storage: A Blueprint for VMware Infrastructure Integration with Storage Hardware (TA1465)

A couple of interesting notes on a few of these breakout sessions.

· John Joseph is providing our keynote presentation. As you may or may not know, John comes to Dell as a part of the EqualLogic acquisition and has been fully involved in the virtualization market and intimately tied in to EqualLogic’s VMware partnership over the past several years.

· BC2411 is being delivered by Donald Wilkins of Navicure Inc. highlighting his virtualized environment built on Dell equipment and his experience in being one of the first to deploy VMware Site Recovery Manager. For more on his implementation, check out our case study.

· TA1465 is being presented by Scott Davis, from VMware’s CTO office and reflects upon some interesting developments underway to optimize the integration of VMware and SANs (and smartly ties into the technology demos we’re demonstrating at the Dell booth – more on that later).

· VD2505 reflects upon a joint engineering project between VMware and Dell to analyze and understand infrastructure sizing requirements for virtual desktop workloads (a sneak peak of this presentation was just broadcast over the web. See it here. More than 700 people have signed up for the breakout session! Virtual desktops are the new hotness.

· BC2512 is effectively a free hour of disaster recovery consulting from our Dell professional services group that also details implementing VMware Site Recovery Manager as a disaster recovery solution.

Also, be sure to check out the Akorri booth (#1314) where they will have a “Live” demo of Akorri BalancePoint managing multiple VMs in an ESX cluster running on Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell EqualLogic storage. It’s a great example of a Dell virtualized data center in a box.

And of course we’ll have a whole slew of virtualization experts on hand to consult with VMworld attendees. In fact, there will be presentations on a variety of topics all day long right in our booth. We'll also have people from our PartnerDirect program on hand for those interested in our channel program.

So please stop by the Dell booth (#1000). You can’t miss it. It looks like this:

And if you can’t make it to the show, our TechCenter has put up a Dell site at the VMworld virtual exhibitor booth so keep tabs on us there.

* These generations of servers were specifically engineered from the ground up with virtualized environments in mind and they hit the mark. We just released VMmark scores for the M905 and R900 configurations and they are smoking!

Simplify Data Protection for Virtual Machines - VMware-Aware Snapshotting for EqualLogic

david_graves — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Making the move to a virtualized environment has many implications - particularly for your storage. For example, this conversion from physical to virtual has changed the traditional thinking on data protection. Now instead of protecting many disparate physical servers, you're protecting hundreds of virtual ones. By putting more eggs in few baskets, new, innovative tools are needed to achieve rock solid data protection.

The idea is to help offload as much of the data protection off the hypervisor layer and onto the SAN, to provide integrated and highly automated data protection. Yesterday we talked about the EqualLogic PS5500E. As part of that, we mentioned an important new feature for all EqualLogic iSCSI SANs (not just the 5500E)named Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition (ASM/VE). Nice acronym, no? BTW - like all enhancements to EqualLogic software capabilities this is available for via free download for those with active support contracts.

ASM/VE is all about simplifying virtual data protection - allowing for automated, integrated and scalable protection for virtual machines. ASM/VE is directly integrated with VMware API’s for fast online backup and quick restores of Virtual Machines. ASM/VMware Edition ensures fast and reliable recovery by automating local SAN-based protection through integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Click here to see a short 5 Min Demo of Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition

ASM/VE combines the benefits of VM and SAN hardware-based snapshots resulting in optimal infrastructure performance and protection. When used with the comprehensive suite of integrated VMware data protection and disaster recovery features, Dell EqualLogic PS Series users can secure their virtual Infrastructure at the application, virtual server, and data center levels for uncompromising business continuance.

We'd like to invite you to a Live Product Demonstration of ASM/VE on Friday, September 12^th. Click here to Register

And if you're totally busy, we’ve created several online, self-paced seminars on both “Comprehensive Data Protection/Disaster Recovery” and “Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition” for your viewing pleasure.

Virtualizing Servers? Look At Consolidating Your Storage

david_graves — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

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.

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