Yesterday the internets were humming with rumours again. Computerbuilder Dell has shown interest in buying a company in thin clients. Not long after it was confirmed that Dell and Wyse have signed a deal.

The official press release states:

“Dell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, to significantly extend its desktop virtualization offerings. The addition of Wyse will expand Dell’s desktop virtualization capabilities and provide new market opportunities for the full range of Dell’s enterprise solutions and services.” (more…)

10GbE connections are getting more common in the datacenters, even for SMB 10GbE is getting within their reach. In the storage market Dell EqualLogic lagged behind large storage vendors like NetApp in functionality and connectivity but now EqualLogic released their new products on 10GbE, solving the connectivity issue.

Both the PS6000 series for large scale implementations and the PS4000 series for the less demanding customers now have the option for 10GbE with SFP+ (fiber) or 10G Base-T (copper).

The two new models, PS6110 and PS4110, both have copper (10GBase-T) and optical (SFP+) connections. The new models can be mixed with other EqualLogic units in a group. Next to the 10Gbit connections the units have a management port for out of band management.

The PS6110 comes in six configurations with support ranging from high capacity 7,200 RPM SAS hard drives to enterprise-grade SSDs. The PS6110 Series can handle up to 72TB in a single array and 1.2 Petabytes in a single group.

In the PS6110 series is available in the following editions:

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We recently received an update about the new stuff that is coming from Dell EqualLogic. Because a lot the information was under NDA so I can’t go into details or give you release dates.

What’s here already?

Last year Dell released the 10GB connections for the PS series. This 10GB connection speeds are mostly done because the marketing asked for it, because the customers asked for it. There are rarely used cases where the 10GB connections make sense but in 95% of all cases it doesn’t give you extra performance.

The bottleneck is often not the connection speed but the spindle speeds limits of the disk themselves. Because of the adaptive load balancing of the PS series the 1GB connections are used very efficiently. When used with the MPIO drivers from Dell EqualLogic you can gain a lot extra performance from the network connections.

So what is coming this year:

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Last week Erik encountered a small issue which required him to change the access to almost all volumes on an  EqualLogic storage infrastructure.

Although EqualLogic has a great interface compared to others, it doesn’t allow changing volume access for multiple volumes at the same time. If you have have to change a lot of volumes you have a couple of options: by hand in the GUI, scripting or command line. (I hope this stays that way to be honest)

Changing volume after volume in the GUI is painstaking and prone to errors. So in my opinion is scripting or command line the way to go. Since I needed him for a review for a document I quickly typed some commands for him. After connecting with SSH to the storage group this is all what you need to change a lot of volumes with some easy commands. (more…)

Dell EqualLogic has a integration kit for integrating their storage solution with VMware and various Mirosoft products. In this Host Integration Kit you find AutoSnapshotManager/VMware Edition and the AutoSnapshotManager/Microsoft Edition.

While I was searching for information about when to use which edition of AutoSnapshotManager for EqualLogic I came across the website of Marc Malotke which I think is worth sharing.  If I did my googling right Marc Malotke works for Dell as a Enterprise Solution Specialist.

He had some very interesting posts and news items at his blog:

• EqualLogic: SCOM Management Pack Release
• Equallogic:  ASM editions
• Equallogic: Planning your IP addresses

Blog: http://www.marcmalotke.net

twitter: @MarcDELL

The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

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When it comes to storage, the EqualLogic PS-series amazes me every time.

Last Tuesday I was at a client site investigating performance issues but when I opened SANHQ and the web interface on the PS 6000E one thing stood out. The performance issues were not caused by the storage device. The PS 6000E is hosting 12 virtualized Citrix XenApp servers en 8 supporting VMs and during heavy load the average latency is 1,2ms with a read/write ratio of 28%/72% and a max of 1100 IOPS.

But yesterday we had to swap SANs, a PS 5000XV for a PS 6000E and the ease with which this can be done amazes me every time. The hardest part was the process of endless firmware updates on the PS 5000XV to get it to a respectable level to get it to join the PS 6000 in the same storage group.

We had to upgrade from firmware version 3.3.0 to 4.3.4 but this is no simple task because you cannot directly apply 4.3.4. First we had to upgrade to 4.0.7, then to 4.1.7, to 4.3.4. Every time uploading the firmware using FTP, updating both controllers, restarting. This took us almost 2 hours to complete.

When this was done, all that was left was to join the PS 6000 in the existing storage group and evict the PS 5000 and this is the process that amazes me every time.

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Title: Webcast: Build an Intelligent Datacenter with VMware and Dell
Location: Online
Link out: Click here
Description: our challenge is to bring virtualization into your datacenter to reduce cost and simplify management. But with the wrong path you can build a datacenter that achieves only moderate virtual machine density, with limited future scalability, locked in with proprietary technologies and high cost service contracts.

Dell offers a smarter path to virtualization.

With Dell virtualization optimized blades running VMware virtualization software, you can achieve maximum virtual machine density and performance. With the available Cisco switches supporting I/O virtualization in combination with Dell’s FlexAddress technology, the I/O layer between servers and storage is virtualized. Add to this the storage virtualization capabilities of EqualLogic PS-series to complete the solution. Together, they offer complete virtualization for the entire datacenter.
Start Time: 18:00 (CEST)
Date: 2009-04-16
End Time: 19:00

While I was doing some research for different customers I needed to calculate the power consumption and how many racks I need. So I collected the links to different calculation models from various vendors.

The tools I found were the following:
Dell Data Center Capacity Planner (online)

HP Site Preparation tool

IBM BladeCenter and System x Power Configurator

If you know tools that do the same, but for another server vendor, please let us know. That way we can keep this list up to date.

Today Dell EqualLogic introduced their new PS6000 series iSCSI SANs. The new models in this serie are the PS6000E, PS6000X, PS6000XV, PS6000S and the PS6500E.

One of the most interesting models is the PS6000S. This PS6000S is an enterprise-class iSCSI SAN with SSD technology and is offering an affordable and easy means to bring the low latency performance benefits of SSD technology. The PS6000S provides higher IOPS and as little as 1/3rd the latency of 15k rpm disk arrays, ideal for challenging applications, such as virtual desktop implementations such as VMware View with linked clone technology. The Solid State Drives (SSD) provide low-latency and high-IOPS.

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Earlier we had an interview with Rob Bloemendal, Dell EqualLogic storage expert.

Rob knows a lot about storage, not only from Dell EqualLogic, but also from the other distributors in their marketplace.

You never hear Rob making negative comments about their competitors. The way he explains the difference between framework and frameless architecture is refreshing. He reconfirms that the discussion shouldn’t be on 8Gbit FC versus 3Gbit iSCSI, but about I/O per second and data characteristics.

Dell is working very actively to train their partners in Dell EqualLogic SANs. The training consists of a large portion of the operator training, a bit of (pre-)sales training and also a large portion was what you could call a Q&A session.

I spent the last two days in Eindhoven at Core Education together with Froos to be one of the first in our company to follow this training.

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