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Friday, January 8, 2010

The SAN's have arrived

Today, 520 pounds of PS6500E storage arrived through the delivery company. My only complaint I have is that the drives arrived in a box and you have to load the array yourself. No big deal but you would think for $80k a piece that they could at least load the array. In any event, I am super-excited to get these built and rolling.

posted by Rick Mitchell Solutions @ 3:09 PM  

4 Comments:

  • At January 8, 2010 8:27 PM , Blogger Dylan said...

    Hi Rick,

    Having set up the array at events around the country, let me say, I known what you're talking about. The reason the PS6500 arrays ship without the drives loaded is that in that dense form factor, the rigors of shipping could damage the connections to the drives if the unit - now in smaller packaging- were dropped very badly. We separate out the drives to protect the system. That's not necessary on some other chassis like the PS6000 line, but is common in such dense ones.

    1 tip for you on the PS6500- load the drives starting from one end and progress to the other end - don't meet in the middle.

    Have fun.

     

  • At January 9, 2010 7:34 AM , Blogger Rick Mitchell Solutions said...

    Not a show-stopper by any means but more of an annoyance than anything. I am just glad they arrived in one piece!

    One question - I am building the two SAN's at the same location and then shipping them to my other data center to do the initial replication over the LAN. Would you recommend removing the drives first in this scenario before I pack everything up to ship?

     

  • At January 10, 2010 11:30 AM , Blogger Dylan said...

    Rick,

    Yes, definitely remove the drives for re-shipment of the PS6500 arrays. More importantly keep the original cartons and packaging and use them to ship the array(s) and drives to the new site.

    When putting the drives back in the array, it is recommended for them to go back into the same slot they came out of, so you may want to label the drives by drive number. This isn't critical - the system will still work if they are replaced in different slots. BUT, it could help down the road if you or your customer call support.

    As always, you can certainly call support if you have any questions along the way:

    1-877-887-7337(US Only)
    or
    Login to your Account or create one:
    https://www.equallogic.com/secure/login.aspx

    Thanks & good luck with the rest of the deployment.

    -Dylan @ Dell Storage

     

  • At January 11, 2010 1:49 PM , Blogger Rick Mitchell Solutions said...

    Thanks for the guidance - I went ahead and used a sharpie to label the drives in the first unit to make sure I had them in there right and got the first one configured and talking to VMWare right now.

    I kept all of the packing materials and will have them ready when its time to ship them out.

     

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