Dell Equallogic PS6500 SAN's - impressions
I have had the pleasure of working with two Dell Equallogic PS6500 SAN's over the past month or so and I thought it would be a good idea to put my ideas out there.
I am going to start with my complaints with the product because overall I am very happy with our purchase. However, with any product there is always room for improvement.
My biggest gripe is the performance monitoring aspect of the SAN itself. This is obviously a big deal to data administrators and probably more so in the iSCSI world where bandwidth is everything. The performance monitoring is basically watered down to the point of being too simplistic. I would like to see more raw data and less Java induced graphs. I realize that the target market for these SAN's are businesses who do not have SAN experience on staff but there should be some better tools to go deeper into looking at performance.
I have spoken about the firmware update process in the past, but I still feel this needs attention. I am not sure why the SAN itself cannot go out and grab the new firmware - then alert the administrator that new firmware is available if you want to update. It feels cumbersome to go through the manual steps of getting the firmware updated for the box.
The Auto Snapshot Manager software which is part of Dell's Host Integration Toolkit is a nice idea but the software feels a bit flaky to me. There are two editions that I have used - one is for Windows Applications and one is for VMWare. The Windows edition will make "application aware" snapshots of SQL Server/Exchange databases so you could actually restore from that snapshot without the worry of data corruption. The software works as expected but after a reboot sometimes the manager will not know how to find the vss-control volume (the volume that the software uses to induce the volume shadow copy aware snapshot) so you have to go back into the iSCSI initiator and and connect to the volume before it will work. The VMWare piece is for some reason a web-based piece of software that looks like an afterthought in appearance but does actually work. I don't like the ability to not be able to send email alerts for failed snapshots with the VMWare package but I hope that is something that will be fixed soon.
I have not tried the replication piece yet as I am waiting for the 100 megabit point to point Cogent circuit to be installed to my second data center but I am anxious to see how it works in the real world.
Overall, I am very happy with the SAN's and still recommend them but there is some room for some minor improvement along the way.
I am going to start with my complaints with the product because overall I am very happy with our purchase. However, with any product there is always room for improvement.
My biggest gripe is the performance monitoring aspect of the SAN itself. This is obviously a big deal to data administrators and probably more so in the iSCSI world where bandwidth is everything. The performance monitoring is basically watered down to the point of being too simplistic. I would like to see more raw data and less Java induced graphs. I realize that the target market for these SAN's are businesses who do not have SAN experience on staff but there should be some better tools to go deeper into looking at performance.
I have spoken about the firmware update process in the past, but I still feel this needs attention. I am not sure why the SAN itself cannot go out and grab the new firmware - then alert the administrator that new firmware is available if you want to update. It feels cumbersome to go through the manual steps of getting the firmware updated for the box.
The Auto Snapshot Manager software which is part of Dell's Host Integration Toolkit is a nice idea but the software feels a bit flaky to me. There are two editions that I have used - one is for Windows Applications and one is for VMWare. The Windows edition will make "application aware" snapshots of SQL Server/Exchange databases so you could actually restore from that snapshot without the worry of data corruption. The software works as expected but after a reboot sometimes the manager will not know how to find the vss-control volume (the volume that the software uses to induce the volume shadow copy aware snapshot) so you have to go back into the iSCSI initiator and and connect to the volume before it will work. The VMWare piece is for some reason a web-based piece of software that looks like an afterthought in appearance but does actually work. I don't like the ability to not be able to send email alerts for failed snapshots with the VMWare package but I hope that is something that will be fixed soon.
I have not tried the replication piece yet as I am waiting for the 100 megabit point to point Cogent circuit to be installed to my second data center but I am anxious to see how it works in the real world.
Overall, I am very happy with the SAN's and still recommend them but there is some room for some minor improvement along the way.
posted by Rick Mitchell Solutions @ 1:02 PM
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