EqualLogic Frameless Architecture: Part 2
July 30th, 2010Read EqualLogic Frameless Architecture: Part 1
Video Transcript:
The last couple points that I’d like to make, and again, many of our competitors have this frame-based architecture on their SANS, and these are SANS where you need to purchase a specific model number so the majority of those SANS can grow to a specific amount of drives. With EqualLogic, with our frameless, virtualized architecture, a single EqualLogic group can easily grow to more than 600 terabytes.
A couple points on the frame-based SANS, first and foremost; your frame-based SAN goes up to a fixed number of drives and you have two storage processors. Even as you add more and more drives to your frame-based SAN, adding spindles or drives doesn’t always equal adding performance that you need for your applications.
Today with VMware or Hyper-V or Xen server, if you’d like to give your virtual machine more horsepower, which you do on the server side, is you give that virtual machine more processor or cache. On a frame-based SAN, even if you give it more drives, you’re still going through those same two storage processors.
Also frame-based SANS, features and functionality are licensed separately. Not only that, as an example snapshots, clones, remote replication, thin provisioning, advanced management; any of those features and functionality are licensed separately from when you buy the storage processors and the disks. Not only are the features licensed separately, but you have to pay software maintenance per feature and something else that not a lot of people know today is some features are licensed based on a fully loaded SAN. What that means is say you purchase a SAN that can grow up to 120 drives and for the next couple years you only load up 30-60 drives. Remote replication and some of those other features are licensed for a fully loaded SAN, so you’re actually paying more because you haven’t fully populated that SAN with those features and functionality.
With a frame-based SAN, 3-5 years from now and you’re ready to upgrade or move to a new frame-based SAN, it’s a forklift upgrade. Or there is a migration that could take days or weeks, and that equals downtime and you may have to have someone actually fly in from somewhere to provide those services migrating or upgrading from one frame-based SAN to another frame-based SAN is going to cause downtime.
Then lastly, is death by nickels and dimes as I call it. All the features of the frame-based SAN you have to pay for, so there can be hidden costs. If you purchase a brand new SAN, you implement it, and all of a sudden you need advanced features like snapshots, clones, advanced integration with those snapshots and clones, with VMware, or Hyper-V or Exchange or Sequel. That feature and functionality wasn’t looked at as a requirement with the initial purchase of the SAN. You have to go back to management and have to ask them for even more money.
With EqualLogics frameless or virtualized SAN, when you purchase the EqualLogic array, everything is included; snapshots, clones, remote replication, thin provisioning, advanced management, advanced integration. When you purchase a SAN, you should get everything included. You shouldn’t ever have to go back to your manager and say Woops! You should never have to go back to your partner or Dell and say you’re adding Exchange 2010 or some new type of virtualization solution, how much will that cost? Oh, and by the way, not only do you get everything, all of the features and functionality, but all updates and future releases, there is no additional cost. So again there are no hidden costs with EqualLogic array.
As we looked at a little earlier, whether you have one EqualLogic array or 16, within that virtualized group or architecture, EqualLogic will do all of the automatic and dynamic load balancing for you. Between drives, within EqualLogic arrays, between EqualLogic arrays, even between the EqualLogic arrays between the Ethernet interfaces, on the PS4000 or the PS6000.
Because of the frameless, virtualized architecture, when you’re ready to buy another EqualLogic array, if you’ve even purchased a single array and it’s 3-5 years down the road, you can buy a brand new EqualLogic array, make sure that both are on the latest firmware, and it’s a seamless upgrade and migration without any downtime whatsoever. So you add your new EqualLogic array to your existing EqualLogic group, you can simply go into group manager, or the management interface, right click on your three-year old array and simply say ‘delete member’ from group. When you do that the old EqualLogic array will copy all of its data to the new EqualLogic array in the background. Because of the frameless, virtualized architecture there is absolutely no downtime.
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