{"id":609,"date":"2010-10-22T09:40:04","date_gmt":"2010-10-22T07:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikaeljensen.dk\/blog\/?p=609"},"modified":"2010-10-27T23:05:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T21:05:00","slug":"a-little-about-equallogic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mikaeljensen.dk\/blog\/?p=609","title":{"rendered":"A little about Equallogic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Founded in 2001 by Peter Hayden, Paul Koning, and Paula Long, EqualLogic focused on building SAN solutions using iSCSI technology – that’s SCSI over IP – which utilises copper cabling based on the Ethernet standard. Traditionally, SANs from other vendors were complex to configure and required much professional consultation. EqualLogic changed this by designing a system that was not only powerful, but heavily optimised and simplistic.<\/span><\/p>\n


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Purchased by Dell in 2008 for a mere $1.4 billion, EqualLogic has continued to develop its technology under the new brand name ‘Dell EqualLogic’ and now offers SANs that utilise Solid State Disk (SSD) and 10GB Ethernet technologies.<\/span><\/p>\n
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The PS Series<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n


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Dell EqualLogic’s SAN solutions all bare the ‘PS’ moniker which relates to their patented ‘peer storage’ architecture. A variety of models are available, but the only real difference between them is network connectivity options, drive technologies, capacity and scalability – all models support the same feature set.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Features are another area that Dell EqualLogic set themselves apart from the competition – other vendors will charge you more for adding replication, automation or integration. Not the case with Dell EqualLogic – all features are available out of the box with every single SAN model they produce, which makes selling them such a simple affair. Apart from the hardware and maintenance, there’s nothing else to sell and no hidden extras!<\/span><\/p>\n

What Is The ‘Peer Storage Architecture’?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In a nutshell, the Peer Storage Architecture refers to the self-managing and scalability features of the Dell EqualLogic SAN range. It’s essentially a form of storage virtualisation – a clever software layer that sits between connecting systems and the hardware. <\/span><\/p>\n

Simplicity is very high on Dell EqualLogic’s list of priorities and what you get presented with is a simple, logical, well designed interface that is nothing short of a joy to use – I can get one of these SANs up and running in 15 minutes with the remainder of the advanced configuration options defined in a further 10 minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Dell EqualLogic storage virtualisation layer is quite simply awesome. There are loads of automatic features that occur in the background too with no involvement from the administrator. I’m not going to go into all the features of these arrays, but I will list my favourites:<\/span><\/p>\n