Inside Enterprise IT : storage SAN

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.

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.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

iSCSI or Fibre Channel – Why does everyone make you choose?

david_graves — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:00:00 GMT

There is an ongoing debate about the merits and future of both iSCSI and Fibre Channel. The growth is in iSCSI, but there is a massive installed base of FC. We believe in unifying your fabric on Ethernet and moving to 10Gbit iSCSI over time as the most cost-effective and least complicated method for storage.

But what to do now? Many organizations have both FC and iSCSI and aren’t ready to commit to one or to throw away their current investments. Most manufacturers force you to choose one or the other, and then live with that decision for years.

Today we’re announcing the new Dell/EMC CX4 series arrays which can alleviate the burden of this decision and remove the uncertainty of the future thanks to their innovative modular I/O technology. It’s called UltraFlex – stay tuned to blog as we will dive deeper into this in upcoming posts.

With UltraFlex, you get two benefits:

· First, since all of these arrays come standard with both 1Gbit iSCSI and 4Gbit FC connectivity, you can consolidate storage on iSCSI for your stranded servers that don’t required FC performance or merit FC connectivity expense with your existing FC servers and infrastructure.

· Second, you are protected in the future thanks to open slots where you can seamlessly add more ports. This can be current technologies or it can be future ones like 10Gbit iSCSI and 8Gbit FC.

With Dell/EMC CX4 you get a storage device that is flexible and future-ready - giving you the choice to adapt your storage to your changing needs without having to start over or commit today.

iSCSI and Fibre Channel UltraFlex I/O modules on CX4-120

Front view of the CX4-960 including, from top to bottom, 3U DAE (disk array enclosure), 4U SPE (Storage Processor Enclosure) and 2U SPS (Standby Power Supply)

Dell Storage Vision Day in London

DELL-Emma F — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:33:00 GMT

On Thursday last week, I attended the Dell Storage Vision Day press event. It was held at Chelsea Football Club, which luckily didn't seem to deter anyone from coming! Journalists attended from across Europe, including the UK, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

We also had a fantastic line-up from the spokesperson side - first up to present was Robin Kuepers, head of storage, EMEA, and James Quarles, Director of Enterprise Solutions. They gave an overview of the EMEA storage landscape including the latest trends, which was brought to life by two customer presenters: Zafar Chaudry of Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust and Marcel Dumont of Schoolbank.nl, the second largest social networking site in the Netherlands.

Zafar's presentation focused on how the Trust is using a Dell/EMC storage solution to support server virtualization from VMware. Marcel then discussed how he has implemented a Dell EqualLogic storage infrastructure to support exponential data growth associated with the social networking craze. Although Zafar and Marcel are using different storage technologies, one thing was clear; they both turned to Dell to tackle two of the hottest IT trends today - virtualization and social networking - and they have already experienced significant benefits ranging from cost savings to a reduction in management time related to storage-specific issues.

Next up was Tony Lock, an industry analyst from Freeform Dynamics. Tony discussed current issues in the storage market with some strong survey data, giving the journalists a lot to think about before the coffee break!

The second part of the day was led by Praveen Asthana, Global Director of Storage and Networking, and John Joseph, Vice President, Dell EqualLogic Solutions. Both Praveen and John flew over from the US to share with the journalists Dell's current and future plans in storage. They both discussed Dell's commitment to deliver on the promise to Simplify IT - from offering a broad range of products for different types and sizes of customers and also including designed-to-order services for customers that need solutions for their unique requirements. The video below captures pieces of Praveen's and John's presentations.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Last but not least, we got to take a tour of Chelsea Football Club at the end of the day – loved seeing the press room where the managers hold press conferences at the end of each game, as well as sitting in the manager’s chair right on the sideline!