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Dell Buys IPO-Bound EqualLogic for $1.4 Billion

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the money-flying-making-a-new-bubble dept.

alphadogg writes "Dell is stretching further behind PCs and servers and boosting its storage business with a $1.4 billion buyout of EqualLogic, a storage company that filed to go public in August. CEO Michael Dell had hinted just last week that Dell could be on the prowl for some big game."

54 comments

  1. Overpriced by iknownuttin · · Score: 1
    Fellow analyst Greg Schulz of Storage I/O also found the price eye-opening, but said: "If you go by the recent valuation of storage IPOs lately, it is more in line."

    Translation: They're all overpriced and the market is a bit overheated.

    I also wonder, who's using these storage companies? Is it for backups of corporate data centers?

    --
    I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
    1. Re:Overpriced by trybywrench · · Score: 0

      I also wonder, who's using these storage companies? Is it for backups of corporate data centers?

      my guess would be disk for blade servers and virtual machines. Also, i think files, on average, are getting larger.

      --
      I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
    2. Re:Overpriced by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Virtualization is the newest large consumer of storage capacity, and SAN storage... :)

    3. Re:Overpriced by crow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right. And the reason virtualization leads to increased use of SAN storage is that when you virtualize a bunch of logical servers onto a small number of physical servers, it suddenly becomes much more practical to use higher-end storage, as you don't have to have separate expensive HBAs, switches, and whatnot to connect to your fancy storage systems.

    4. Re:Overpriced by marafa · · Score: 0

      you are half right. san is required for blade servers. but dell? hell!

      dell's blade servers are like 2 years behind the rest. they have had only one generation unlike hp or ibm who are not on their third or 4th generation.

      their blade design is not fully redundant and bigger than the competition while using up more energy. i have no idea why anybody would consider dell blade systems!

      so unless dell is thinking of selling the san storage independent of thier blade systems, it isnt going to move much

      --
      _ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
    5. Re:Overpriced by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I take it you've never looked into their products? Great stuff. Most other companies charge you not only for the space you buy, but require that they have an engineer come out to set it up (billed to you, of course) AND they base the annual support charges based on how much space you have available.
      Want to add more space later? Okay, but you have to buy the space AND the upgrade fees too.

      EqualLogic was cool because YOU can set it up by yourself, you don't pay more depending on the amount of storage you have, and you don't have to pay for adding more storage later. Just simple to setup, simple to use storage.
      My company uses a few EqualLogic items for storage and Data Recovery (the software has built-in snapshot capabilities).

      As far as who's using them and why, any server room can make good use of one; as a blade center SAN, VM storage, or simply just general storage via iSCSI. These things are great.

    6. Re:Overpriced by ChrisA90278 · · Score: 2, Informative

      "Is it for backups of corporate data centers?"

      You see it used everywhare. What do you keep user data? A round here every PC has a network drive on it's desktop and that is where peole keep all their files. So when I log into another PC in the plant I get my files on the desktop. That "drive" is really a big disk array. How do they back it up? The company owns three geographically dispersed arrays and they keep them synchronized using high speed data lines. They also use tape.

      Basically you would use a storage array any time you own more than a handfull of computers. If just makes sense to get the data off the desktop so it can (1) Be properly secured and backup up and (2) follow the user's login. This is such a good idea that storage companies are doing well.

      It is over priced because it is a growing marget and everyone wants to buy in now before it gets even bigger

    7. Re:Overpriced by jaseuk · · Score: 1

      Dell are on their 3rd generation of blade and second generation of chassis. The fourth generation blade and third generation chassis are not too far away. The Dell chassis has fully redundant power and networking capabilities, I'm not sure what else you'd expect.

      Dell would not sell an iSCSI SAN built-in or bundled with their blade systems, that makes no sense at all, the product would be equally useful to a HP customer or a Dell Rack or Standalone server user.

      Jason.

    8. Re:Overpriced by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      their blade design is not fully redundant and bigger than the competition while using up more energy. i have no idea why anybody would consider dell blade systems!

      Because they cost about half as much. If physical space and a multitude of expandability options are not the highest priorities, that's pretty important.

      We have an IBM Blade Centre and a Dell Blade Centre. I dearly wish we'd never bought the IBM one, because it delivers no advantages (to us) over the Dell one, the blades cost about twice as much (for equivalent configurations) and aren't as configuration (eg: want 32G of RAM in your IBM blade ? Sorry, you have to buy an "extended memory" blade that only has a single hard disk - no local RAID for you). For that sort of cost advantage, I can live with slightly more rack space used, especially since we've got plenty of it.

  2. Don't worry by jasonmicron · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Dell is just preparing to launch the biggest SAN-based Halo 3 server ever.

  3. Implications for EMC? by crow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder if this has any implications for Dell's partnership with EMC. Will Dell not be pushing EMC's low-end iSCSI storage now that they have their own? Or do the offerings from this new acquisition not compete at the same level as the EMC products?

    Disclaimer: I work at EMC, but have no inside knowledge concerning Dell or this acquisition.

    1. Re:Implications for EMC? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think almost nobody takes EMC**2's low-end iSCSI storage very seriously. I think most people using EMC**2 hardware are doing so because EMC**2 has a reputation as a high-end player. Their low-end iSCSI implementation is a LOT more expensive than other offerings from smaller, more nimble companies like EqualLogic. If I'm shooting for the low-end hardware, I might as well get the best price I can, no?

      --
      My blog
    2. Re:Implications for EMC? by brass1 · · Score: 1

      I wonder if this has any implications for Dell's partnership with EMC. Will Dell not be pushing EMC's low-end iSCSI storage now that they have their own? Or do the offerings from this new acquisition not compete at the same level as the EMC products? This will kill Dell's relationship with EMC, something Dell's been trying to do for a while anyway. The Equallogic products compete directly with EMC's low- and mid- range stuff.

      Disclaimer: my employer has a substantial investment in Equallogic gear I help manage.
    3. Re:Implications for EMC? by TopSpin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I wonder if this has any implications for Dell's partnership with EMC. Dell just released the MD3000i which sort of obviates the AX-150. Buying EqualLogic doesn't give Dell a FC platform to obviate the EMC CX gear they're reselling. Perhaps they'll put FC phys on the PS boxes...

      I've always thought of EqualLogic as the NetApp of iSCSI; excellent design and performance but very expensive. Last I heard they had just over 3000 customers. Buying EqualLogic gives Dell the iSCSI SAN assets to compete with EMC/NetApp/IBM enterprise iSCSI.

      HP should'a bought 'em. Perhaps they'll snap up LeftHand instead.

      --
      Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
    4. Re:Implications for EMC? by ePhil_One · · Score: 1
      I think almost nobody takes EMC**2's low-end iSCSI storage very seriously.

      I'm curious if you have any basis for this, because I'm actually looking at EMC's Clarion based iSCSI solutions. Certainly its not the cheapest solution out there, but what I want is reliability, esp given my new companies last foray into SAN was Dell's disastrous in-house product, and they are a bit gun shy, and at the end of the day the companies business depends on this thing being up 24x7x365.

      Thats the risk of SAN, Fast & Flexible, but downtime is VERY painful.

      If I'm shooting for the low-end hardware, I might as well get the best price I can, no?

      This statement makes me think I should discount you out-of-hand. I have a size and performance goal in mind, with a tiered performance goal. I'm opting for iSCSI because 1Gbps my performance goals while eliminating enormously expensive 4Gbps FC cards (2 per server!) and FC switches. In the past the cost of connecting a Dell Poweredge 2850 to my EMC properly almost exceeded the cost of the server ($2,900 vs $2,800), and thats before I factored in Fiber cables (which I somehow had a huge supply of).

      If cost is my only concern I'd be buying whitebox desktops stuffed full of SATA drives running FreeNAS or some such.

      --
      You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
    5. Re:Implications for EMC? by myxiplx · · Score: 1

      Whitebox desktops? Naaah. What you really want are a few Sun x4500's (http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/). Buy some 1TB or even 2TB drives a few years down the line and that's some serious storage!

    6. Re:Implications for EMC? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do some in house testing of an emc iscsi san and an equallogic. The emc iscsi implmentation is a joke. No true multipathing. No load balancing. No scalable backend interfaces. The speed difference is amazing as well. The equallogic sas drive based unit is easily as fast as our fiber channel, fiber drive emc cx unit.

      Emc is filled with hidden costs, bloated products and very poor integration.

    7. Re:Implications for EMC? by Thundersnatch · · Score: 1

      HP should'a bought 'em. Perhaps they'll snap up LeftHand instead.

      The last LeftHand engineer I talked to seemed to think that might happen. Apparently, LeftHand could get out of the custom hardware business sometime next year, sunsetting the NSM-* line to focus on the HP and IBM-server based offerings. Better hardware, and the speed is the same. The also have a VMware virtual appliance that runs SAN/iQ, so maybe that's a potential buyer.

      This won't hurt the LeftHand product a bit, as it is just software running on commodity boxes (the NSM-160s were made by SuperMicro anyway I think). LeftHand's cluster architecture is designed to handle the loss of an entire nodes, unlike EqualLogic, where the redundancy is within each node (and that requires custom hardware).

      As for price, well, LeftHand is $30K for a 9 TB module based on the HP DL320s. That ain't exactly cheap, considering the HP hardware with 9TB is only $11K. But still quite a bit cheaper than EqualLogic.

    8. Re:Implications for EMC? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 1

      I'm curious if you have any basis for this Yes. I tried it. Their high-end products are nice. Their low-end products, inherited from some company they bought out, are crap. Their low-end stuff doesn't have true multipathing and it's a royal PITA to setup and configure. The stuff will go down if you sneeze on it. Sorry, but for my money, I'll take EqualLogic any day over low-end EMC.
      --
      My blog
    9. Re:Implications for EMC? by ePhil_One · · Score: 1
      Their low-end products, inherited from some company they bought out, are crap.

      Thanks, but please define your terms. High end is definately the Multi-million $$$ Symmetra, which we avoided or an IBM Shark because of EMC wanting to control our config. We latter traded it for the Clarrion FC (CX600/700) line, which worked well enough but was clearly a few steps below the IBM Shark (a Symettra competor, unfair comparison for sure). Are you dissing the Clarrion line or an even lower end product (I recall Dell selling an even lower end EMC branded product, the AX150 perhaps?

      Their low-end stuff doesn't have true multipathing

      Yes, definately noticed Powerpath wasn't an option on the EMC iSCSI, they said that functionality was built into the OS so it wasn't needed.

      I saw a demo Equalogic was pushing regarding VMware & their iSCSI product, I'm willing to give them a chance but don't have the resources if it goes very badly (my new company has been burned once before by poor implementation)

      --
      You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
  4. 1 word: by teknopurge · · Score: 0

    OpenFiler.

    Fantastic piece of kit.

    --
    Website Hosting
    1. Re:1 word: by Thundersnatch · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I implemented Openfiler, but the poor clustering options (active/passive only) made it a non-starter for anything remotely ctriical in my organization. A SAN simply has to be available, with no interruptions (even a few seconds of failover time breaks many database applications). With Openfiler, clusters essentially have to be local, active/passive, and failover isn't exactly seamless.

      iSCSI Gear like EqualLogic and LeftHand go way beyond this... new devices simply join the cluster, and data is restriped dynamically ammongst all nodes according to the replication policies for each volume. You can also have multi-site clusters with appropriate bandwidth settings, remote scheduled snapshots, MPIO, etc. Blow a module and things keep working without any interruption at all.

      We're using openfiler for archival and backup storage now, but I don't see anything in the project roadmap to make me think it will compete with commercial iSCSI SAN and NAS solutions anytime soon. Maybe they can get something working with OCFS2

    2. Re:1 word: by canuck57 · · Score: 1

      OpenFiler sounds interesting. But I have always just loaded Samba. With NFS already part of the xNIX OS it is easy to do. But nice to see it packaged in one nice tidy bundle.

      It does amaze me why companies can make so much in the storage area. Then try to get a lousy 50gb from the administrator of the storage. Being it is so expensive, it is often micro-managed to no-end. I would like to see some honest cost estimates of storage...where does a big box actually make sense, 20TB, 100TB, 1000TB?

      I suspect far too many shops buy big box when really just take out the old 80GB drives and slap in 3 x 1TBs ($350 ea) will do. That is, if a system only needs 2TB to run, why not just provide 4TB? Local storage is almost always faster, and if a vendor claims they are faster, measure it and verify that claim for yourself. In at least you always want Oracle redo/logs on local disk. And never put the OS/swap on these big boxes.

      BTW, 3 disks can be fully mirrored, a common PC issue if you only have 4 slots and one is a DVD. Hint, 2 equal sized partitions per disk and striping can make a 1.5TB mirrored volume of 3 1TB disks. Turns old PCs into storage units.

  5. What will be left in two years? by The+Second+Horseman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    EqualLogic was kind of a cool company that bundled value and decent software engineering into a good package, and had good support for stuff besides just Windows and Linux (VMware, NetWare, etc). Good service, etc. There are probably more than a few EqualLogic customers that are less than thrilled about this.

    1. Re:What will be left in two years? by Wolfraider · · Score: 0

      Including use. We have never had any trouble with our Equallogic SANs. Currently we own 5 of them, with the total space averaging around 30TB. We also used to use Dell server, but have been migrating everything to HP. About half of our Dell servers reboot randomly every day or two. We have talked to tech support and found out that the motherboards are going out on 2 year old boxes. Still trying to get several replaced. We need better reliability for critical boxes.

      Heres to hoping that Dell doesn't bring the quality of the Equallogic SANs way down.

    2. Re:What will be left in two years? by afidel · · Score: 1

      If those Dell servers rebooting are 2650's then just pull the DIMM's in the 3rd and 4th slot. We had a bunch of customers with those boxes and that was the only way to get the random crashes to stop. We had Dell replace entire boxes and still have the issue. One customer blamed our OS build, but once we pulled it down to 2 DIMM's the box stayed up for over a year vs the 12-72 hours it was staying up before.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    3. Re:What will be left in two years? by ndrw · · Score: 1

      I work for a company that has a couple of these SANs, purchased shortly after Dell burned bridges by saying their faulty PowerVault wasn't faulty. I've never been a big Dell fan, so we're all around bummed out about this.

  6. Cool! by spazimodo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've been talking to Equallogic guys at various VMWare events and I think they've got a great product. The biggest pain with implementing ESX has been the cost around shared SAN storage (yes you can use NAS now but come on.)

    I love VMWare, but can't stand their parent corp (EMC) and can't wait for the Compaqification of the SAN market with the part of IBM played by EMC. Any company that forces their customers to buy $100 SATA drives for $900 deserves to die at the hands of commoditization.

    --

    Fsck the millennium, we want it now.
    Millennium Crisis Line: 0890 900 2000 [calls cost 50p/min]
    1. Re:Cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      EMC *Knows* that its low-end product is becoming commoditized, and that eventually so will its highend product. The big $$$ spinning rust market is going away. Same Every man and his dog is doing mirroring, snapshots and remote replication. Some are even doing it at wire-speed in silicon (hello LSI). Which is exactly why EMC bought VMWare - and sold of 10% of it for more than their initial investment for the entire company. Shit, wish I'd cut a deal like that. Its why EMC bought nLayers, Smarts, Legato etc etc. The disks will just become part of the whole story. The future is in the software.

      Disclaimer: I work for EMC, but I'm not espousing the corporate line. I've giving you the reason why I personally believe that EMC is going to go great guns and joined the company. Plus they offered me a shitload of money plus really good medical and education benefits. They are also absolutely and definitively not NetApp, who are currently number 1 on my "Companies who piss me off because they sound like a pack of loonie religious converts".. I used to work for Sun, and almost worked for Veritas before Symantec bought them, killed them, chopped them into mincemeat, peed on the whole bloody mess then walked away cackling madly.

    2. Re:Cool! by ocbwilg · · Score: 2, Informative

      I love VMWare, but can't stand their parent corp (EMC) and can't wait for the Compaqification of the SAN market with the part of IBM played by EMC. Any company that forces their customers to buy $100 SATA drives for $900 deserves to die at the hands of commoditization.

      If you think that EqualLogic's biggest advantage over EMC was in the hardware prices, you're only getting half the story. The FAR more interesting thing to me was that when you bought the iSCSI array it came with all of the software for snaps, replication, etc included in the purchase price, and it's as easy to install as a server. With EMC, you buy a similar capacity SAN for 1.5x-2x the price and then after that they hit you with $1800 in professional services for installation, then charge you $3000-$5000 for each additional piece of software functionality that you need.

  7. Interesting buy for Dell by warpedma · · Score: 3, Informative

    The whole EMC thing makes me wonder the reason for the purchase. That having been said, we've been using EqualLogic for 2 1/2 years, and at the price point, it's pretty much unbeatable. It's ridiculously easy to configure and grow. We've a small staff with a huge amount of storage (35 TB) due to the image intensive nature of our work (digital imaging). EqualLogic has been a life save for us from both time and performance standpoints. We could not have gotten purchase approval for anything faster.

  8. Change in the product or support? by djveer · · Score: 1

    EqualLogic seemed to have a relatively well integrated hardware and software solution as well as a good support system. I wonder how Dell taking the reigns will affect this as we were considering implementing a EqualLogic in our organization.

  9. More on Forbes by jeks · · Score: 1

    More info on Forbes.

    EqualLogic is a data storage systems provider based in Nashua, N.H., with over 3,200 customers in 30 countries. Its virtualization products allow a single computer to function like multiple machines, so companies can spend less on hardware and energy costs in data centers.

    Eh? Aren't they talking about VMware here? EqualLogic sells storage solutions. If he means that several machines can access those storage systems simultaneously, he's out on a limb! I've never heard of such systems!

    1. Re:More on Forbes by jojo1835 · · Score: 1

      Huh? Are you sharing what you're smoking? The whole point of ESX is that it allows multiple physical boxes to share the same chunk of storage simultaneously. It's kind of required.

      Tim

      --
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    2. Re:More on Forbes by myxiplx · · Score: 1

      Go read up on Lefthand's SAN/iQ sometime, that's pretty much what that does. It's essentially network raid, turns a bunch of smaller SAN devices into a distributed network.

    3. Re:More on Forbes by jeks · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ouch.. I think my joke went flying straight over your head.

    4. Re:More on Forbes by jeks · · Score: 1

      Also, the article is clearly incorrect in suggesting EqualLogic sells virtualization software. They don't. Granted, they work with VMware but that doesn't mean they have virtualization software of their own.

    5. Re:More on Forbes by brass1 · · Score: 1

      Go read up on Lefthand's SAN/iQ sometime, that's pretty much what that does The biggest issue I had with the Lefthand solution is that they sell it an an open solution; you, supposedly, can pick anyone's hardware and use Lefthand's software to implement your storage cluster. Only not so much.

      Lefthand certifies exactly three systems. The Prolient SL320s, the IBM System x3650 and a box they OEM from somewhere. Let's see... The prolient hold 12 drives, the ibm box hold 6 drives and Lefthand's OEM box holds 4. The density sucks. A lot.

      Yes, yes. 6 drives/rack unit is really good. I agree. Just don't start the sales meeting telling me that you have an open software solution then try to sell me an HP box I don't want.
    6. Re:More on Forbes by afidel · · Score: 1

      Actually the 320s goes to 14 drives if you replace the DVD drive with the 2xSATA expansion option =) We just got one in not too long ago and they are very nice. 9.75TB in 2U is just incredible if you don't need fast seek times =) We're using one for DR file storage and will be buying another for disk to disk to tape. Neither application is going to tax the system that much and my plan at DR if it's a long term situation is to buy faster storage, robocopying from the DL320s will be much faster than restore from tape =)

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    7. Re:More on Forbes by ender- · · Score: 1

      The biggest issue I had with the Lefthand solution is that they sell it an an open solution; you, supposedly, can pick anyone's hardware and use Lefthand's software to implement your storage cluster. Only not so much.

      Lefthand certifies exactly three systems. The Prolient SL320s, the IBM System x3650 and a box they OEM from somewhere. Let's see... The prolient hold 12 drives, the ibm box hold 6 drives and Lefthand's OEM box holds 4. The density sucks. A lot.

      Yes, yes. 6 drives/rack unit is really good. I agree. Just don't start the sales meeting telling me that you have an open software solution then try to sell me an HP box I don't want. Not only that, but in our testing, we've found LeftHand to be slower than EqualLogic, and the interface isn't nearly as good. In addition, they continue to spout the 'open hardware' aspect, but they don't even support adding more than the default 2 NICs per box, which we have an issue with. Heck we weren't even thrilled with the 3 NICs on EqualLogic, but at least it's more than 2, and has 3 more failover NICs. What's the point in having a server with extra PCIe/PCI-X slots if you're not even allowed to use them? Sheesh.

      True, EqualLogic doesn't have the network RAID aspect, but I'm not sure its necessary to be spending that much on further locally redundant storage when we'll be replicating offsite in addition to archival backups. At least for our needs. YMMV

      And finally, I found the LeftHand salespeople to be a bit more slimy, and too quick to badmouth the competition. The EqualLogic sales guys were friendly, and while certainly not fond of the LeftHand product, were in no way badmouthing them, and were happy to reasonably discuss the issues brought up by the LH sales people without attempting to slam their competitors product.

      This is just my recent experience with these two companies anyway. Still not sure we're going with EqualLogic for our needs, but it seems to be a good product. I hope their buyout by Dell doesn't hurt their culture or their product.

      --
      Nothing to see here
    8. Re:More on Forbes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interesting you noticed that too. The Wall St. Journal article mentioned virtualization in passing while talking about this acquisition by Dell. Perhaps it is "management think" since the VMWARE IPO to tie the name in to make their offering look more attractive.

    9. Re:More on Forbes by pjr.cc · · Score: 1

      he mentions VMWare because equalogic + vmware have been working together for some time to make the equalogic solution with vmware perform exceptionally well.

      And if you knew vmware esx, you'd also know that vmfs is a cluster filesystem (like ocfs2 and gfs2) where multiple machines *DO* access the block device at the same time (in a co-ordinated fashion).

      And if you've never heard of a cluster file system before then perhaps you shouldn't be commenting on a storage product - or at least, perhaps you should do a small bit of googling before pushing out a comment like that...

    10. Re:More on Forbes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Look, I was kidding. It was a joke. If you're too retarded to see that, it's your problem.

      I know very well how a clustered file system works. I also happen to know what the whole VMware + EqualLogic deal was all about. If you are a new EqualLogic customer they would sponsor your VMware licenses with $5,000.

      Also, the article is still incorrect in claiming EqualLogic sells virtualization products, cause that is simply not the case.

  10. Re: Openfiler, FreeNAS, etc. by Power_Pentode · · Score: 1

    I spent last weekend running a number of performance tests (using IOMeter) against a couple of iSCSI targets on a oldish server and there's a performance issue that I just don't understand. The initiator is MS's software on W2K3 R2. I hooked up five 10k spindles and a dedicated RAID box (RAID0) to the server's U160 SCSI HBA. Running IOMeter locally on the server, performance was pretty good for the hardware, about what I'd expect -- with four threads & 4k chunks & 100% random & 50% R/W, an avg req time of 7 mS and a few hundred IOPS. Using the Starwind target with a small RAM disk to measure the raw end-to-end iSCSI performance the numbers were very good (avg req time of 1-4 mS), regardless of the network.

    But When I "marry" the storage to the iSCSI target software, instead of getting req delays of A+B = 7+4 = 11 mS, I see delays of 22 mS. With the same target hardware running Openfiler the avg delay was 26 mS.

    Very interestingly, the speed of the network had almost no impact on performance unless I was testing with large chunks and sequential reads. With random I/O, I got essentially the same performance using 802.11g wireless as I did using 1GBit hardwired! The RAID had 128MB of writeback cache and was using cached I/O. The drives were using command tag queuing.

    Why oh why is there such an added "penalty" latency when combining the storage with the iSCSI target application? I was testing with consumer network gear at home, but I got about the same numbers using a dedicated HP commercial switch at work. Also roughly the same numbers when using an LSI RAID card in the server instead of the external RAID. I want to build a moderate performance iSCSI SAN for use with a couple of Exchange 2007 boxes, but I'm not going to bother if I have to take a huge penalty hit for using iSCSI instead of cobbling up some local storage.

  11. Re: Openfiler, FreeNAS, etc. by matuscak · · Score: 1

    You don't mention the switches you're using, but from the fine Equallogic training class I went to a couple of weeks back, a couple of the big things that can effect iSCSI performance are flow control on both the switch and client's ethernet interfaces, disabling unicast storm control on the switch and turning on jumbo frames. The general drift was that iSCSI can pound the snot out of switches and cheap ones just don't work all that well. Stacked Cisco 3750s are apparently popular, and there were a couple comments that (ahem) Dell switches suck for iSCSI.

  12. What? by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 1
    Um, first, there's a LOT more to EMC than low end iSCSI storage. In fact, iSCSI is probably the absolute last thing that should pop into mind when you hear EMC.

    something Dell's been trying to do for a while anyway What? Losing a channel partnership isn't something you have to TRY to do. Dell could negotiate cutthroat prices with almost any storage vendor. So if they wanted to, why didn't they?

    Also, what makes you so sure Dell is would stop selling fibre channel? Or what makes you think Dell would stop reselling EMC fibre channel devices?
    iSCSI is so... wrong for a SAN. The logic is it _can_ be cheaper because you can reuse existing network equipment. *cough* And skip the iSCSI HBAs. *ahem* and single path. Yaaaayyy, now it's just block-level NAS.

    My guess is Dell made this decision to compete with HP for price sensitive customers looking at server/storage bundles.
  13. I use em... by pjr.cc · · Score: 1

    I work for a company that sells these equalogic units (and install/train) and they are quite impressive.

    I wont bang on about them, but they have a number of plus's which make them great for smaller companies and they scale quite remarkably well. They're pretty simple to manage and so forth (but you can get at the guts of them, they run a bsd variant).

    One of the things i do appreciate about them is its 1 cost and you get everything they have to offer (on the software side anyways) and you dont have to get any golden screwdriver/license upgrades.

    Performance wise in the bang for buck arena they are very competative though.

    The biggest problem with selling them? iSCSI. Alot of people just dont seem to get iSCSI at all and write it off as a "less secure and slow" fibre channel option. We sell fibre channel products as well, and while fc has its advantages, they really aren't in the area of speed or latency (often thats true even when your not using a iSCSI hba).

    But, as i said, i work for a reseller who stocks these and am ultimately going to be written off as biased (and yes we sell 3par, hds, sun and so forth as well).

    1. Re:I use em... by h.ross.perot · · Score: 1

      iSCSI is new; but with the introduction of 10G into the maistream you will see it take a chunk out of Fibre Channel SANS. As it should. Now; there are redundancy issues to address; but the technology is coming. EMC has priced them selves into a corner.

      --
      ... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg ...
  14. Re: Openfiler, FreeNAS, etc. by Power_Pentode · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the reply. My puzzlement is that when measuring the pure iSCSI performance (with a ramdisk on the target) performance was great, regardless of the network -- avg I/O delays of 1mS with one IOMeter worker thread and 4mS with four worker threads... and a few hundred IOPS. This is all random I/O and the total throughput in MB/s is fairly low and not important for my app.

    When the iSCSI target was disconnected from the ramdisk and connected to the real drives, the avg I/O delays were considerably worse than just adding the pure iSCSI overhead (1-4 mS) and the local performance on the target machine (7 mS). Instead of about 8-11 mS I get an avg I/O delay of 22-26 mS.

    This is a simple "SAN" with one initiator and one target, no MPIO, etc. For pure random I/O there was no performance difference between a dedicated HP ProCurve, consumer 100MBit, consumer 1GBit, and consumer 802.11 wireless! There was a major performance difference between the networks with sequential I/O and large blocks of course.

  15. Re: Openfiler, FreeNAS, etc. by Thundersnatch · · Score: 1

    Please write these test and your methodologies up and posit it somewhere. You can even probably get some ad revenue by doing that. I'm sure you'll also get a lot os suggestions as to what the trouble might be. I know I'd like to see the full details of each test myself.