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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Recently there had been strong grow and push for the 2nd tier ISCSI storages from the SAN Storage company like Netapps, EMC, DELL, HP, IBM and etc. A lot of the white paper and marketing brochure had been publish and been communicated to the public in worldwide, which claim the VM is out perform with the ISCSI VS Fiber Channel SAN.
I would like to share couple of my finding in the real Prove of concept and test that myself had personally setup and experience here. VMware do support hardware base ISCSI HBA and software base ISCSI through its VMkernel. Couple of thing that you may want to consider before we really decide to proceed further with the ISCSI. Networking become more and more important since the last decade to be operate most of the important pieces in the Production Data Center. Networking had also become the major issue for most of the time especially in VM environment which may need a bigger bandwidth to support the multiple VMs that been consolidated to single Physical Host.
I had been invited by the Equal Logic vendor to run the real test with the demo in my datacenter. Below is the major finding I would want to share
Test Equipment
Server – DELL PE 2950 8GB and 2 x Quad Core 2.0 Ghz
Storage Switches – DELL Gigabit Switches
Storages – Equal Logic PS 5000 with SAS HDD
Operatin System – SUSE Linux, Windows 2003, ESX 3.5
Impressive
- High Processing speed due to the processor build in for each storage bay. It can be scale up to 12 storage bay in the cluster basis. Each enclosure contains 16 physical spindle drives with SAS technology
- Simplify management – the entire process to configure the storage to be useable is less than 15 Mins. Its all web base and able to run on the open source browser such as firefox
- Maximize through put through the software ISCSI initiator been tested on servers and my personal laptop. It able to suck up 97% of the gigabit through put from my laptop gigabit connection and the server gigabit connection as well.
- High redundancy with global hotspare configuration recommended
- Impressive load balance feature which able to scale from storage and perfomance perspective. Additional enclosure will provide additional spindle power and processing power from the stroage bay. Compare to Clariion series currently, which always provide slow perfomance when the storage are only 60% populated.
- Shorter commissioning process and reduce provisioning time line. almost plug and play
- RAID 50 available as an option to be configure during the provision process
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