There had been numbers of review and discussion always regarding the choice of storage for us to run on Virtual Environment today. I believed that the hot discussion is always moving talk about the right storage with right design and implementation to the VM farm always. The most hottest topic are still regarding the NFS, ISCSI and FC implementation which provide better features, performance and reliability.
Personally, I had 3 of it running in my environment now and of course, I had spent a huge number of times to really test out all the solution and compare apple to apple to further study my requirement. Here is some reading I get from my test for 3 solution above.
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For a while ago, I had spoken to my team and friends about the amazing concept if we do able to use the HPC concept to scale our Server hardware in term of processors, memory and I/O without increasing the amount of ESX server in the Virtual Environment. I remember the question had been raised to the VMware representative and this is not in the road map for the ESX servers. 2 days back when I attended the seminar in town and I found this interesting server which is IBM X3950 M2 had been presented with the capabilities I had been looked around. Some of my friend may think the idea of doing this is crazy or over limit, but in real scenario, you will realize the benefits in term of managing and scaling from time to time when you managing a real huge environment with a massive amount of Virtual Machines.
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Virtual I/O is not new to the IT market and I was introduced by my friend about Xsigo recently.
Many enterprise who have implemented virtual environments as a way to consolidate servers and centralize management are running may facing I/O bottleneck issue. No matter how many servers, switches, SAN storage or operating systems that you have, you’re still require to go through IO device.
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Economy Crisis this year has encouraged users to consider the ISCSI SAN Vs FC SAN today. Data Storage growth will never stop unless the business is stop. In order to keep the environment growth, the IT architect will have to provide a cost effective solution in the finance critical timing like now.
Performance wise, we may know that the Equallogic ISCSI might not beat the huge SAN box which easily cost you double as your TCO on ISCSI. I would like to share my finding relevant on the features it bundle with Dell Equallogic. In FC SAN, we are able to achieve performance and functionality, which require always additional license cost and expensive infrastructure to support it. Today, ISCSI provide more flexibility in term of FC due to the common understanding we all have on the IP technology which we deal with it everyday.
In Equallogic ISCSI, you will entitle every features which bundle together with the storages you purchase.
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The latest version of ISCSI SAN Equallogic PS 5500E which launched recently had provide better capacity, performance, extra functionalities and more spindles in arrays. It could be support both 500GB and 1TB SATA II spindles up to 48 drives in a single array of 4U. A very impress usable storage space in single array which up to 48TB in raw. If we compare to the capacity, it is hardly found that a single array would provide a huge capacity at 48TB in Raw today. In additional to that, DELL had provide all the necessary features as for storage management as free which integrated as part of the storage purchase for Dell Equallogic ISCSI SAN. The latest features is regarding the Snapshot Manager for VMware. Previous version is only supported on Microsoft environment, but now, it had also supported on VMWare environment.
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