In recent years Dell has bought a few compagnies, starting with Equallogic and then some of the most interesting in the industry. I do not know why we had to bid for 3Par, we’ve got Compellent which is actually a nice fit to the Dell storage IP.

Equallogic is a fascinating product, I’ve been working with the PS-series since beginning of 2005, and the story has never changed. I had the pleasure to meet the founders back in 2006 in Nashua, NH, and I then found my call for Equallogic. The idea behind, which I usually call a “good-old collective” from the 60’s. All arrays work together, but they are also independent in their own rights. Some are the skinny ones with SSD and SAS disks, the fatter arrays are the PS65xx’s with 48-disks, and divided in to different departements (called Pools in EQL). With all arrays placed in up to 4 pools, it’s like working in a company with different departments, and all are working for the same goal

The funny thing is that with now 7 generations of products, they all work together for the common cause no matter the age of the arrays. In my humble lab I run a generation 2,4 and 7 products in the same SAN. Who else can do it like this ? You can even upgrade the whole environment without interrupting production, no fork-lift upgrade, just ease-of-mind when running the SAN.

So Equallogic is the collective minded products, so what about Compellent, which Dell bought last year?

From sales/technical perspective this is a very fit product, originating from Eden Prarie, Minnesota, it’s about a year older than Equallogic. It works completely different than Equallogic, and it does not.

Tiering Is a part of both products, it’s the foundation of Compellent and has been since the early beginning. On Equallogic is just about being released into production sites, being in beta for some time now. It’s fascinating to see it working on Equallogic with 3 different generation of arrays, all running the latest firmware. Compellent tiering is the basis for the product, you can actually choose not to use it (do not know why this is an option).

Compellent has a different build-up compared to Equallogic, basically it consists of two controllers, with a number of JBOD arrays underneath. Unlike all other SAN vendors the Compellent has physically controllers not tied together in a frame. This means we can do an online upgrade of the new controllers without causing to much interruption the production. You can also switch the disk arrays when in production. Do consider to plan this carefully with Compellent’s fantastic Co-pilot support.

Another good part is that when you buy the licenses for the different capabilities you need for your Compellent SAN, you just buy for the first 96 active disks, not including Hot-spares. This means when the SAN grows beyond this point you simply buy the metal to approx. 1000 disks. Also a paradigm shift compared to traditional vendors is when you change controllers. You do not have to buy all the licenses again, you own those licenses for all the time you have an Compellent installation.

Equallogic is a pure breed ISCSI SAN, and it works like a charm, setup taking from 12-30 minutes the first time you try, and you do not ever have to buy licenses for anything.

Compellent is a mixed breed SAN, it can run FC, FCOE and ISCSI, and you have options for different licenses. But again as I mentioned before, you OWN those licenses.

Both environments are virtual, which means you have to trust those new SAN’s. They will put the data-blocks on the disk-tier which suits it best. If you’re an “old” administrator running a SAN where you define the raid, pools, and you now exactly which 2 disks your volume/LUN is residing, this is new times, and you might have to get use to it.

This is 2 sides to the same storage, you do not ever have to do an fork-lift-upgrade, you have all your licenses, and with tiering of the storage, the strategic setup can be made, which fits (almost) all installations.

So what’s the third angle to all this ? No it’s not the Dell PowerVault MD series which are targeted at the small-medium business. No the third angle is NAS headers and deduplication.

Recently Dell introduced the FS-7500 NAS header for the Equallogic range. It’s the beginning of NAS for Equallogic which we have been longing for, for so many years. The buy of Ocarina is a pure fit for the FS-7500 which is based on the Exanet software also bought by my chief-no-1 Michael Dell.

On Compellent we have a couple of options, the Znas and a windows storage server based NAS header. The Znas has the most complementary setup for the Compellent. Based on OpenSolaris with the genius ZFS filesystem, this is a setup I missed during my prior employment with Sun Microsystems (e.g Oracle). With unlimited scalability, I would love to see another deduplication stack on top of this, which should make it a killer towards few of our competitors.

At the end, we have 2 storage sides and an upcoming 3rd angle which makes it very funny times to be  at Dell in the server/storage business.

About the author:

I’m a dane (living in Denmark), I’ve been working with storage since 1997, with Data General SAN’s which became Clarion, and then bought by EMC. Been working almost exclusively with ISCSI and Equallogic since 2005. But also worked with other vendors like SanRAD, NexSan, Qlogic, Brocade, Cisco and of course Dell.

Categories: Dell, English

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Sponsors

  • Dell
  • UnoEuro webhosting
  • Website and logo design contests at DesignContest.com.
  • Reviews of the best cheap web hosting providers at WebHostingRating.com.