With Expert Guidance and Consulting from Sencilo Solutions, Advance Search Selects MDI iSCSI SAN for its High Performance and Ease of Management. - February 9, 2008
Just two weeks after Dell acquisition of iSCSI SAN maker EqualLogic Corp., one of its server customers put a SAN from EqualLogic competitor MDI into production. "If we'd waited two weeks, would it have changed our decision? Hard to tell," said Thomas Berry, Director of operations for equipment vendor Advance Search. "I know now there may be further integration [with Dell and EqualLogic], but at the time I didn't."
We looked at a lot of different Dell SAN products, we previously use an EMC Clariion arrays that it had purchased through Dell, but tired of trying to manage Fibre Channel. "I don't know if we just didn't understand how the EMC SAN was supposed to work, but it seemed like we were always having to open help tickets and get professional services engagements to help us work out problems," Berry said.
Since EMC was the incumbent vendor in his environment, Berry evaluated EMC's new AX4-5 array when considering a new SAN, but said he wanted a 100% iSCSI SAN. The AX4-5 is available as Fibre Channel or iSCSI. "It didn't seem like a purely iSCSI SAN to me," he said.
Advance Search also evaluated an EqualLogic PS Series SAN, and Berry said the MDI Express Stor had so many more features then the Equal Logic unit. "We did an evaluation matrix, and when we totaled up all the points, they were the clear winner," he said. "MDI Express Stor have native CIFS, NFS and iSCSI protocals, in other words we got to retire some 12 file servers using the Express Stor, something the Equal Logic can only dream of doing. What tipped the balance was has a familiar Windows Server look and feel so training is a snap, the Equal Logic unit like other Dell products try to sell you week long training which adds to the TCO of the SAN. Our support staff was already familiar with Windows so the choice was a no brainer, said Berry.
Sencilo showed us how the Equal Logic units requirements twice the disk space (RAID 50) to get half the performance of the MDI unit, along with its non-Active-Active design, we needed high-availability, not the dated design from Equal Logic. Brian McCarthy, the President and Storage Veteran said "selling against Equal Logic is more about pointing the features of a Microsoft based Storage Server vs. Equal Logic who uses a dated Open Source O/S, which explains why upgrades and bug fixes can take months to resolve." McCarthy went on to say, "had Dell not purchased Equal Logic it would of been road kill for Microsoft and it's Windows Storage Server partners."
The MDI SAN will eventually hold 35 TB capacity, but Berry admitted the company is not far along in rolling it out. Only about 10 TB of SQL, file and print, and Exchange data have been migrated to the SAN. The migration is going on while Advance Seach is also rolling out VMware server virtualization, upgrading to SQL 2005 and Exchange 2007, and creating SQL and Exchange server clusters. "We like to do a lot of things in parallel here," he said.
The virtual iSCSI SANs have also not yet seen the light of day. "Our DR facility is at SunGard in Florida," he said. "Once we get the production SAN rolled out, we'll do our first migration of data to the DR server at our primary site and ship it to them, rather than trying to do the first upload over the wire."
We owe a great deal of thanks to Brian McCarthy and his team for showing us the true cost of ownership of a Equal Logic SAN vs. the MDI Express Stor iSCSI SAN. Sencilo will be a long-term trusted partner for years to come.
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