A good colleague of mine pointed out a very interesting feature in the new PS6100 arrays, recently announced by Dell, the vertical port failover. But this is indeed an old feature…..
When we worked with the old Type-1 and 2 controllers (the grey and the blue), you actually didn’t care where the ethernet connection where.
You simply looked at the switch and looked after the 3 connecting lights out of 6 possible.
I cant remember what it was called back then, I worked for a Equallogic reseller, and all my material is lost.
But you could fail over a single networking port, to the other controller, which did cause some funny situations in the datacentres when an administrator wanted to have all the connections on a single controller “because it did look better”, and then he plugged out a cable to move the connection to the other controller. I did have some calls at that point from customers who couldn’t understand why the “passive” controller had all the connections. It did take some explaining to tell them, there was nothing wrong, and this was all part off the Equallogic virtualization.
From type 3 I believe it was, until the type 10 controllers, we only had the controller failover, where the whole controller was failed over to the secondary.
BUT now it’s back to basics, Dell has re-introduced the “Vertical Port Failover” on type 11 and 12 controllers. This is a significant gain, as you can fail a single network cable, and still be sure you have maximum throughput. As an old Equallogic guy this sweetens my heart.
By the way, Dell has also introduced some new arrays with the type 11 and 12 controllers. The type 11 is actually for the new PS6100 series 1Gbit arrays, and besides 4 x 1Gbit ports this also feature a separate management port. The PS6100 comes in different flavours, the 4U 24×3.5″ disk SATA based, and the 2U 12×3.5″ or 24×2.5″ disks in SAS or nearline SAS drives.
The type 12 controllers is the PS4100 with same configuration options as the bigbrother, but still the 4000 departemental arrays still has 2x1Gbit networking ports, and a management port.
