iscsi

The Dell TechCenter will be hosting a chat at 3PM CST today on iSCSI and Virtualization. This is part one of a 2-part chat series that the TechCenter will be hosting. So join us later today and bring your questions and your thoughts.

Part two takes place on Thursday at 3PM CST and will feature the Director of the Dell | EqualLogic PS series, a technologist from the Office of the CTO, and an EqualLogic storage strategist. The topic is iSCSI Security and Best Practices. This is a can't miss chat and your opportunity to Q&A with the architects of our Dell PS storage enclosures.

Dell this week had its first product roll-out with me on board. Probably not that significant to anyone but me, however I thought it was interesting to see the behind the scenes work in preparation for that activity. I was also quite impressed with internal pre-launch education.

I think the biggest take away from the PS4000 launch, if I may take off my technical hat for a moment, is it's flexibility. WAIT! Stay with me techies, I promise to return to geek speak in the next paragraph.  Taneja Group analyst Jeff Boles may have said it best (quoted here):  "It's an initial building block for people to get into EqualLogic iSCSI SANs," "They can start out here using the traditional PS series architecture, and add more storage down the road and pop into a PS6000 as they grow."

OK, back into my technical hat, or propeller beanie as it were. Those marketing words can be scary. What they are referring to is that with the PS4000, you get the same set of features (i.e. virtualization, management, thin provisioning, replication) that comes with the PS6000. This makes it a great fit for the remote office or smaller shops looking for an alternative to direct attach devices.  Yet if you grow out of the PS4000, you still have expandability simply by adding a PS6000 to the group. The number of arrays per group  with PS4000's is 2, but add in a PS6000 right into the same group, and you can now have 12 arrays total (See page 4 of this whitepaper for group explanation.) On a related note, this came across an internal Q&A thread: Provided firmware is current, a PS4000 can replicate to a PS6000/PS5000/PS100 and vice versa.  

I managed to get this PS4000 snapshot in between showings at our briefing center.  

For more information, I've put up a page on the EqualLogic PS4000 on DellTechCenter.com, and don't miss a special Thursday Technical deep-dive Chat on the new array next week. 

The following was put together by Jeff Junker, Technical Marketing Consultant at Dell EqualLogic.

Now that the EqualLogic PS series has been value meal sized into the PS4000, it’s important to tell you what you can do with this new array? Here’s the good news; it’s everything you can do with a PS6000 but on a smaller scale. The one exception is SAN HQ, which is also included free of charge with the PS4000, and offers the full supersized, multi-site management and performance analysis found in the PS6000.

For multi-site deployments, SAN HQ is pragmatically a multi site status manager, allowing detailed historical reporting and analysis based on the rich statistics available for all PS series arrays. The extra twist here is the many ways the data can be sorted and correlated and the insight, validation and justification enablement it yields to SAN managers.

Yes that was a mouthful of info, but consider this: Lets say you have 20 remote sites of various sizes, a main data center and a DR site. You have Exchange and SQL applications running at each location and essentially no IT staff at either of the remote sites. Historically, DAS storage or a simple NAS device were the primary storage options, and on site visits were often the primary method of provisioning new volumes and services. Now with EqualLogic PS4000 at the remote site enabling virtualized storage, you can logically provision new volumes with the SAN group manager application.

In addition to remote provisioning and virtualization enablement, the PS4000 allows you to setup local snapshot schedules to protect data periodically during the day, as well as replication schedules to protect volumes and copy data to remote or DR sites. On the status monitoring side, one would expect storage volume information, thin provisioning status, capacity trending and network link volume. You can also get link connection latency, so effectively you have a QOS monitor on your application volumes. For Exchange specifically, localizing where problems are, and maybe more important, where they are not, can facilitate application trouble shooting and save chunks of time knowing where not to look. Moreover, response time trending can add visual clarity to volume availability and perceptions that something changed for better or worse.

Data can be sorted and correlated in many ways: across all EqualLogic SAN groups, a single group, pools (tier of storage in a group), members (PS series intelligent array), volumes (across multiple members) or even individual disk drives. You can even drill into an array and launch the Group Manager to enable provisioning or management of volumes or the many software features included for free (snapshot schedules, replication, thin provisioning, Auto Snapshot Manager for HyperV and VMware to name a few).

The twenty something sites can all be monitored and managed from a single application screen, from your central or DR site or wherever you want (ie: VPN from home). When the call comes in for application storage analysis, SAN HQ yields a foundation of correlated information. Oh, and you can export all the data to excel for hard copy reporting and SLA confirmation too…

SAN Headquarters Overview Demo - http://www.dellenterprise.com/san-hq/san-hq-overview.aspx

SAN HQ Install and Operation Demo- http://www.dellenterprise.com/san-hq/san-hq-install-and-operation.aspx.

Click the following images to enlarge:

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.

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. 

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.