can you send me white papers around best practices?

Hey Jake, There is a TON of EqualLogic best practices information available on the www.equallogic.com/support site (over 60 papers under Tech Reports), which is free to EqualLogic customers, it just requires registration. Are you a current customer? If not or if you are unable to register for some reason, send me your contact information through this website (Click on my name & select 'send message'.)

Just a few things I can offer without knowing details are:

Flow control is very important
Jumbo frames makes for better performance
Use PortFast to avoid unnecessary downtime in networks that use Spanning Tree
Use MPIO for better performance and redundancy

And lastly - make sure your SAN is capable of handling the storage requirements of your environment.

Let me know if you want more information on any of these things.