Equallogic SANs

Say Hello to Low Cost Storage Network Have y'all seen how GMail gives you virtually infite storage space? The steep reductions in storage as well as developments in very large storage area networks (SANs) have made this possible and for a very low cost your business can have a very large SAN. We tried our hands on a Dell Equallogic iSCSI SAN this week, and a one word description of the experience was "wow". What is remarkable is that this SAN is like an all inclusive appliance; it is like a toaster. You plug it to the server and avail all the sophisticated technology. You talk to the SAN via browser based Java interface. Can you imagine one of your Windows C: Drive letter showing a capacity of 4TB ?! Lots of things become possible with availability of excessive storage. The obvious one is that businesses can perpetually save the company emails instead of limiting the emails of employees. The database guys are going to love the larger spaces because now they no longer have to remove and rebuild indexes or compress files to save on storage. There is another important application for SANs -- as a backup device on steroids. The Equallogic sports what they call disk snapshots which are full replicas of existing drives. During our tests, they creating, restoring snapshots was absolutely painless. Imagine what it can do for a high traffic webserver or an application that requires constant versioning (aka "what changed?" or "delta compute" applications). Have y'all wondered how hotels (airlines) can overbook and still run a business? Let's say you run a hotel with 1000 rooms, but you can always book up to 1100 rooms, because there are always cancellations. The Equallogic SANs come with such a optimistic allocation algorithm (that you can disable, of course) that lets the administrators allocate more storage that physically available. We think that's pretty cool, and now understand how Google can give away so much free storage. Call us if you need more information about the Dell Equallogic SAN or need a demo. See Also: • Dell Products at Lyons Computers • Link to Equallogic Website Viewed 1020 Times Date Blogged: 11/15/2008