Dell Equal Logic SANs meet VMWare VSphere

I took two 2-day Dell Equal Logic courses last week.

One was Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery/Auto-Snapshot Manager,the other was Integrating Dell Equal-Logic PS Series in VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Workshop.

Both classes were interesting and I think I picked up some decent idea's that I didn't start the day with. Interestingly enough our instructor was on the Equal-Logic team before Dell purchased the company, and she now teaches for Dell. She had an excellent insight into the company before and after the acquisition.

Things are getting to that virtual utopia on both ends, servers and storage, in a hurry!  I can already see a day when some small and medium size businesses only have 2 VMWare server boxes connected via iSCSI to a SAN unit. For some applications even the hardware firewall solution will disappear.

Goodbye hardware sprawl, say hello to virtual sprawl!

I got some quality time in the class on a Dell Equal-Logic unit which can be hard to come by unless you work for a larger company. While every new system has hidden landmines just waiting to be discovered, the Equal-logic was laid out pretty well. Many of the features that I had difficulty with on software SAN's, like creating/assigning/and the connecting via an iSCSI connection were effortless on the Equal-Logic. Masking some of that complexity is useful to be able help with a seamless migration from NAS and Direct Storage to a SAN model.

Of course one of the big hurdles with any SAN deployment is cost. Using iSCSI instead of Fiber Channel is a plus, but you're still looking at a large investment and/or lease deal.

But technically I like the SAN model and see it as an evolution for smaller businesses to be able to jump onto that centralized storage solution, thus alleviating many of the headaches that those same small businesses inevitably suffer from.

The snapshot restoring of deleted files was probably my favorite part of the functionality demonstrated in the class. I can think of several times in my career that this would have made a considerable difference in recovering data.

A company called DataCore has a product called sanMelody that performs many of the same  functions, and also is installable to run on a spare server you may have, but the marriage of hardware and software into an easily usable piece of equipment makes the Dell Equal-Logic hard to pass on.

Let me know your thoughts and/or experiences with iSCSI SAN's and solutions.