To Our Valued EqualLogic Customers:

We would like to invite you to a forum where you can meet other EqualLogic users, share insights into best practices, and hear the latest innovations Dell has brought to the EqualLogic family.

User Group Agenda:

• Firmware 5.1 load balancing updates
• VMware vSphere 5 Integration
• New versions of HIT for VMware and Microsoft
• New version of SANHQ
• New EqualLogic Arrays:
  • PS6100 line
  • PS4100 line
  • FS7500 NAS (CIFS/NFS)
• Discussion and share experiences with others

To Our Valued EqualLogic Customers:

We would like to invite you to a forum where you can meet other EqualLogic users, share insights into best practices, and hear the latest innovations Dell has brought to the EqualLogic family.

User Group Agenda:

• Firmware 5.1 load balancing updates
• VMware vSphere 5 Integration
• New versions of HIT for VMware and Microsoft
• New version of SANHQ
• New EqualLogic Arrays:
  • PS6100 line
  • PS4100 line
  • FS7500 NAS (CIFS/NFS)
• Discussion and share experiences with others

]]> http://www.ultralevel.com/2011/10/equallogic-ps4100-6100-measurements-and-usable-capacity/feed/ 0 http://www.ultralevel.com/2011/09/dell-equallogic-user-group-indianapolis-nov-2-2011/ http://www.ultralevel.com/2011/09/dell-equallogic-user-group-indianapolis-nov-2-2011/#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:53:32 +0000 Abdul Karmach http://www.ultralevel.com/?p=2115

To Our Valued EqualLogic Customers:

We would like to invite you to a forum where you can meet other EqualLogic users, share insights into best practices, and hear the latest innovations Dell has brought to the EqualLogic family.

Our November 2nd meeting will focus on the new scale-out unified storage capabilities and highlight the new Dell™ EqualLogic™ FS7500, including:

• Capabilities the EqualLogic FS7500 brings to EqualLogic users such as multiprotocol scale-out NAS capabilities for EqualLogic storage.
• With enhanced load balancing, gain up to 3x performance boosts with Dell EqualLogic Firmware 5.1 over previous EqualLogic firmware releases.**
• Improved quality of service with consistent and even traffic flow in a converged SAN/LAN networking fabric through Data Center Bridging (DCB).
• Management Integration including Microsoft Active Directory integration.

Attend the Dell Indianapolis user group meeting on 11/02/11 and enter for a chance to win a Dell™ Mini 10 netbook!***

**Based on 2011 internal Dell testing, performed on Dell PowerConnect 6248, PowerEdge R710, EqualLogic PS6000XV-450, and EqualLogic PS6000S-100 systems.

***NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Legal residents of the 50 United States (D.C) 18 years or older. Ends 10/18/2011. To enter and for Official Rules, including odds, and prize descriptions attend the Dell user group meeting in Indianapolis, IN on 10/18/2011. Void where prohibited. By entering you may be contacted by Dell regarding its products and services. Your personal information is covered by Dell’s privacy policy and you can opt out of receiving Dell communications at any time. See www.dell.com/privacy for more information.

The long awaited hardware refresh is here!

New EqualLogic hardware enclosures with more drive types, sizes and combinations are now available.

Dell has had a ton of new introductions recently, including the FS7500 NAS solution for EqualLogic (shown left), the NX3500 NAS solution for PowerVault, FC for PowerVault, and now, new and updated enclosures for EqualLogic.

In addition, the latest Dell firmware for EQL, v5.1 was recently released and brings some powerful new features like support for data center bridging (DCB) and support for sub-volume auto-tiering  between Members in a Group.  This one is huge!

This adds to EQL’s network and capacity load balancers the ability to balance workloads by performance, between Members in a Group.  (Think in terms of mixing Members with different drive types in a Pool and automating exchange of hot and cold data automatically).

Of course this is a no cost download for your existing customers and can be applied on all EQL arrays.

The new EQL enclosures are the PS6100 series and PS4100 series.  As always, you can continue to mix and match old EQL enclosures with new, preserving their investment and avoiding rip and replace upgrades.

For an overview of the Dell storage portfolio see http://www.dellstorage.com/

Stay tuned for updates and enhancements to the Compellent line up!

Request special pricing

Questions about Dell Storage?

Try out our new interactive tool!

With EqualLogic, we have a frameless or virtualized architecture.

When you start looking at a frame-based architecture, what you basically start off with is a frame.  You have to sit down and decide, for the next 3-5 years, how much data growth and performance, the types of features, functionality, etc. that you need, and with a frame-based SAN, that usually comes as a specific model number, and a specific model number of a SAN that you purchase can grow to a specific amount of drives.

When you look at many SAN solutions today, many of our competitors have a frame-based SAN.  With EqualLogic, we have a frameless or virtualized architecture.  When you start looking at a frame-based architecture, what you basically start off with is a frame.  You have to sit down and decide, for the next 3-5 years, how much data growth and performance, the types of features, functionality, etc. that you need, and with a frame-based SAN, that usually comes as a specific model number, and a specific model number of a SAN that you purchase can grow to a specific amount of drives.

As an example, you start off with dual controllers for redundancy and performance, and a number of disks.  With EqualLogic, we also do this same thing.  We also start off with dual controllers and a certain number of drives and this is your basic SAN.  Right now the frame vs. frameless, or the competitive architecture vs. EqualLogic, doesn’t look that different.  Let’s grow that frame-based SAN.

As months go by, you need to add more capacity for disks or performance, so we go ahead and we add more drives.  With the EqualLogic array, when you’re ready to add more drives for capacity and performance, you not only add disks, but you also add two more controllers for cache throughput and performance with your disks.  As you add more and more EqualLogic arrays, your performance and your capacity, will scale more linear than by just adding disks or spindles to your SAN.  Then if you’ve planned out your performance or capacity requirements  for 3-5 years, you’ve just purchased your SAN, what happens if you’re acquired by another company, you acquire another company, or a new application comes online, compliance, video surveillance, etc, now what happens with your frame-based SAN, is you’ve now added all the disks and all the spindles that you can to your frame-based SAN.  What this means is there is no way to continue to grow with this frame-based SAN.  If you’re frame-based SAN in this example grows to 60 drives, you’ve filled those drives up, now you need that 61^st drive, you need to buy another frame-based SAN and that’s a forklift upgrade.

However with EqualLogic, what you’re going to see here is that you can have up to 16 physical EqualLogic arrays, and you can manage those as a single storage system.  So whether you have one, single EqualLogic array, or 16 EqualLogic arrays, you manage that EqualLogic environment the same way.  Ease of use and scaling are still going to be the same from day one, or day 365.  Also, what you’re able to do, is these 16 physical EqualLogic arrays can be solid state drives, SAS drives, beta drives, it doesn’t matter.  Every single, physical EqualLogic array is called a member.  Multiple EqualLogic arrays or multiple members fit into an EqualLogic group.

Also, you don’t have to worry about provisioning and rate types.   Once you select the rate type per EqualLogic array, the array or member will take care of the provisioning, the hot spares, the movement of date, etc.  So as you see you have one physical array or 16 array or members, you basically are working with a single pool of storage.  From that single pool of storage, what you’re going to do is create volumes, so these volumes 1, 2 and 3; you would map these as physical drives, or drive letters to a Windows server.  These volumes 1, 2 and 3 could be drive E, F and G to your local Windows server.  Also if we talk about virtualization as an example with VMware, volumes 1, 2 and 3 could be mapped or connected as data stores to your ESX servers.

With your frameless architecture, or virtualized architecture for SANs, whether you have one or 16 EqualLogic arrays you manage that the same way.  The same thing is not just for management, but also when we look at the pool of storage.  With our automatic load balancing and tiering, what you’re able to do is these volumes can move from one physical array to another, and because of our virtualized architecture, the physical server or virtual server doesn’t care what physical array these volumes are on.

During production you can have these volumes on high performance, low capacity, 15K SAS arrays and solid state SAS arrays and then later on as you look at compliance with archive and keeping data around longer, it might not necessarily need that production type of performance, but we still need to have it readily available so these volumes can actually automatically tier themselves, and they can move from solid state and 15K SAS drives to 10K SAS drives and SATA drives.  You can have EqualLogic take care of the movement of data or you as the network administrator can simply click on these volumes and say move it from one rate type to another rate type that’s on separate or distinct drives and different EqualLogic arrays.

Read EqualLogic Frameless Architecture: Part 2

See a live EqualLogic product demo

Learn about Dell storage

“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!

Read more EqualLogic articles

See a live Dell EqualLogic product demo

Join Dell and VMware to learn about the new capabilities of vSphere 4.1 and how the new EqualLogic 5.0 firmware makes deploying Tier 1 Apps and virtual desktops more efficient.

This webinar is over, but you might want to:

• See an EqualLogic free live demo
• Learn more about Dell EqualLogic
• Learn more about VMware vSphere

Register Today Designing and building a highly efficient internal cloud is top of mind for organizations of all sizes. Self-optimizing and tightly integrated server and storage platforms with the new vStorage APIs in VMware® vSphere 4.1 can help ensure project success. Dell is one of the first VMware partners to deliver on the promise of vStorage through integration with the vStorage APIs. Dell™ EqualLogic™ is designed to deliver greatly enhanced performance of virtualization deployments. Join VMware and Dell to learn about: The new capabilities of VMware vSphere 4.1 How the new EqualLogic virtualized SANs (PS6000XVS w/5.0 Firmware) can make deploying Tier 1 apps, virtual desktops and internal clouds more efficient We will also hear from Tim Vogel, Chief Technology Officer of Xtium, a joint VMware and Dell customer, who has used the new functionality and will present his findings. LIVE WEBCAST EVENT DETAILS: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 9:00 a.m. PT, 11:00 a.m. CT 12:00 p.m. ET FEATURED SPEAKERS: Andrew Gilman, Solutions Marketing Manager, Dell Tim Vogel, Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Xtium LLC Michael Adams, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, VMware