SAN Upgrades And Tilting Dogs

A new year brings a new SAN in our lab. As long-time readers know, it was a sad day in the virt lab when our EqualLogic 3800 went back to the mothership.

We have good news for the new year. Roman Kichorowsky, EqualLogic's director of PR, was able to allocate a top of the line, brand-shiny-new PS3900XV to the IWeek/NWC testing lab for long-term loan and ongoing eval. Roman has earned a spot on my holiday card list for next season. One of these days I'm going to make it up to Nashua and pay these folks a visit.

I'm curious to see how Dell promotes the EqualLogic product line in addition to solutions and expertise from U.K.-based Network Storage Co. It looks as though Dell will end up with aggressively priced offerings for a wide range of customer needs. Think anyone at EMC is getting nervous?

We were very pleased with the configuration/setup and performance of our old loaner array and can't wait to roll up our sleeves and begin integrating the 3900 into our shop.

Aside from the obvious that it's nice to have a fast, snazzy iSCSI SAN again, there are a wealth of new features I'm looking to test, including a "Smart Copy" and restore capability for SQL, with future functionality covering Exchange, Oracle, etc., as this year plays out.Stay tuned for notes on general setup, care and feeding, thin provisioning, and lessons learned.

The gritty details:

All in all, this should be an ideal head for a SAN in a heterogeneous virtualization shop.

We have a number of other storage solutions tentatively slated for evaluation ranging from turnkey appliances to large capacity SATA-based iSCSI arrays. We may even rig up an Apple Fibre Channel Xserve RAID if the stars align. It's going to be a fun year.One bit of caution: Room lights would occasionally dim and dogs in the next town tilted their heads during POST when we fired up our old 3800. Sixteen 15K drives on the new array drawing from dual 450 watt power supplies is nothing to take lightly. The spec sheet on our new array says the beast throws out 1,700 BTU per hour and draws up to 540 VA, so be sure to plan rack power and cooling accordingly for any dense storage device! (...and yes, I was kidding about the lights dimming.)