8 Reasons Why Your Next Purchase Should be Storage
July 26th, 2010
Of course, we’re talking about Dell EquaLogic virtual ISCSI storage here. Let’s face it, storage is the foundation of our datacenters. Servers and equipment only exist in order to give us access to our data, and for many administrators storage is an after thought rather than a foundation.
“How much storage does this server need?” is the common question and understandably so, since SAN solutions have historically been relatively expensive and complex… until EqualLogic, that is..
1. Centralized storage is an enabler
Whether your primary goal is to simplify your network, get virtualized, add storage capacity, shorten your backup and recovery windows, or improve your business continuity / disaster recovery plan, you’ll get ALL of this with your first EqualLogic array.
2. EqualLogic’s virtual storage is FAST and EASY
You don’t need a PHD in storage to manage provision or manage EqualLogic storage. In fact, if you can manage a Windows server you can master Dell EqualLogic in an afternoon. There’s no need to understand LUNs, RAID Groups, IOPs, or fiber channel.
3. Don’t waste a penny on unused storage
We all have that admin that says his new server needs 2TB of storage, even though we know there’s no chance he’s going to need all of that.
- The old way: order a new server and a DAS just for him, and when he only uses 200GB, the rest goes to waste and sucks up power and cooling.
- The EqualLogic way: Thin provision him 2TB of storage, assign it to his server, and you’ll only see the 200GB he’s using. Once his project is done, delete the volume and it goes right back into the pool for use elsewhere.
4. Everything is faster on a SAN
It’s no secret that the longest standing bottleneck for servers (and workstations, for that matter) is the disk sub-system. Processors and memory have received ground-breaking performance increases, yet hard drive speeds have improved modestly. A disk array is pretty much mandatory if you want to even come close to full utilization of your new servers.
5. Buy fewer servers
How many times have you bought a new server because you needed more storage or faster disks? We’re all guilty of that at one time or another. There’s no wasting server resources when you purchase and manage your storage independently.
6. Get the most out of server virtualization
Fast, reliable, flexible storage is a critical component to virtualization. In the past, the vast majority of my design discussions revolved around how many hard drives should go in each virtual host.
Of course this meant we had to plan ahead of time which VM would go to on which host because the Exchange VM definitely needs more disk throughput than the Active Directory VM. With centralized virtual storage you are truly virtual- just type in the size you need and the EqualLogic does the rest!
7. Shorten your back up and recovery windows
No more backups at night! With the click of a mouse or a simple schedule, your production volume is snapshoted, and your backup server can backup the snapshot in the middle of the day having ZERO affect on your production network.
8. Do you have a viable DR plan?
I’ve reviewed a lot of DR plans in my day and it’s staggering how many of them include a drive to Iron Mountain to pickup tapes. This reminds me of the old Windows days when I manually loaded 30+ floppy disks to install the OS.
Site-to-site replication with EqualLogic couldn’t be easier. With a few clicks, the array will take a snapshot of your volume and start a bit-level replication to it’s partner.
When you need to recover the offsite data, you can either choose to replicate it back to site A or physically transport the replication target array back to the primary data center and you’re back in business!
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