I have couple of deals dealing with Ionix before, I believe the issue here is not the owner of the products, and they should focus to improve the knowledge of the sales and technical guy to brief the partner more. No doubt, Ionix is 1 of the greatest product out of the market, but in order to success, the education pieces to partner and users are important.

I will say is an ambitious move for VMware this week towards the cloud computing. Remember Ionix suppose to release the automation and management pieces for vblock, I am not sure whether it will still continue or they are some changes going to happen soon.

You can refer to the official link here for more information.

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Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform too. Cisco had moved ahead of their competitor to bring this to the world and it is 1 fo the great platform that get attraction and adoption worldwide. Cisco UCS or Nexus 5000 both provide the unified I/O capabilities and allow us to transform the data center architecture today. Beside consolidating LAN and SAN into 1 with FCoE, the more interesting capabilities that get attention by us are the switching capacity.

The Nexus 5000 or UCS 6140 switches supported up to 1.14 Tbits/s and this number are more than enough to consolidate all the necessary traffic it need to be delivered by the LAN & SAN. If you have this solution in place today and well integrated with the unified storage as well as the core networking environment, you can easily choose to run NAS, ISCSI or FC through the same Unified frabics and Unified Storage you have. As everyone know, there are no perfect solution or protocol for every scenario, but now, you will able to choose the right protocol for every different computing system, application and database requirement without implementing separate ISCSI, NFS or FC physical infrastructure.

This is a nice picture to summarize the description about Unified Platform which I get it from http://viewyonder.com

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What is contain in Vblock? It is an end to end package of virtualization include Cisco, EMC and VMware products which simplify the delivery method of the virtualization cloud infrastructure moving forward.

You can read the full details from here

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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.

• Snapshot Volume Manager
• Thin Provisioning
• Raid 5, Raid 50, Raid 10
• Auto Load Balancing
• Web Base Console
• DR Replication
• Storage Replication
• Volume Clone

The details of the available features is more than what I am stated here of course. Imagine if you own a FC SAN today, you may end up paying additional charges for every piece of licenses you require of the functionality. Beside this, virtualization and VMware is become a main player for every Data Center today. Same with Equallogic, it had also become a powerful competitor to compete with the major vendor like NetApps, EMC, HP, HDS, IBM and etc.

Whithout comparing the cost and performance, I am really impress with the simplify management provided by Equallogic. You will not require to be long waiting of the web console, and it is user friendly and easy to be managed. Compare to FC SAN, you will require certain level of skillsets and patient for administration which you may suffer from the slow loading from the console always. Additional to that, FC SAN will become slower when the number of spindle and workload is increase, but Equallogic has it advantage with every array will increase the processing power and throughput. Personal experience, I am only require less than 10 minutes to setup and configure my Equallogic Storage array, and able to start provisioning right after the configuration done. Is Really Fast!!

I run the performance test on my ESX 3.5 server to compare the I/O performance Vs FC SAN, I realize that the performance is acceptable with the amount of money we pay for it. Simply because you may not virtualize the servers which require the real I/O intensive performance. I am able to achieve approximately 140MB/s with FC SAN for read/write, with Equallogic, I manage to achieve 115MB/s as maximum throughput in my VM. Again, this may be impacted due to the software ISCSI initiator. ISCSI HBA will able to improve the performance with minimize the overhead on ESX host. For my test, I only manage to run with single array. If we have more array in the future, it will able to increase the disk performance and storage throughput. 10Gb Ethernet are also on the way to the market next year. Equallogic are also design for SRM solution which provide by VMware to simplify the DR solution. With this storage solution, we will no longer require a big network pipe for SAN storage replication as we did for the FC SAN previously.

Latest array PS 5500E are providing 48TB in RAW with SATA, which will be a good option for DR solution to provide cheaper hardware cost & better functionality. If I has been asked to reduce my CAPEX for SAN purchase, the only option I can think now is ISCSI as my option. Cisco 3750 is the recommended switches for DELL Equallogic, it is much more cheaper if we compare to the brocade FC SAN swithces.

Never the less, FC SAN are still the best option in term of reliable and performance, but as it is a tough time now for budget spending, I believe Equallogic has provide us an additional option with limited budget.

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Here I would like to specify talk about ESX storage planning. As many of the cases I read and experience before, more and more users are really heading to the stage of choosing specify storage for specify solutions. Example you may think off for using Netapps on NFS for ESX, which claim better performance, dedupe and protocol different. Somehow, the users had forgotten that they had not run any of netapps storage in their existing environment. When we look at the management perspective, the operation management for IT support is not SIMPLIFY. Everyone know how important to standardize our environment as well as simplify out IT environment. The more complex you have, the more pain you will feel.

ESX had been design to run on multiple different range, different brand, as well as different type of protocol of storage in the market today. The reason of this is able to provide users a number of choices to be choose for deployment which may really fit the existing environment. Most users are now been looking at the storage specifically for Virtualization, that was really due to the marketing strategy or brochure been always claim the specify products will gain better performance. If you are the storage guys in your IT department, maybe you should consider what will be the best fit for your environment VS what is the coolest technology in the world for VMware.

Let talk about 1 scenario here, a user who had existing running with cx3-80 EMC SAN storage with all fiber switches ready. The storage is only 50% populated. The storage guys had raised the request to bring in the latest ISCSI technology from netapps and Equal logic. When it does the price comparison, the TCO and implementation cost of ISCSI become too huge different VS extending the enclosure on cx3-80. Back to real world, I am really curious that if SAN Fiber storage will be poor perform and inconsistent compare to ISCSI if you have everything setup and configure correctly in your fiber SAN. Most of the case is NO. As in my POC test, I can see that the performances on the Fiber are still better and stable.

ISCSI is really simple and easier manage, but somehow, there are many technical details that require redeploying the entire environment to gain the peak performance you expected. That is definitely an advice at the end you will get from the vendor. Therefore, a best fit storage for your own environment is more important always. You should look at CAPEX vs OPEX when you plan the storage for virtualization.

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