Marc from Dell posted a reply to my More Meetings post where I talked about the concern I have with the upgrade process with their Equallogic SAN. According to the sales rep we had out last week it takes on avg 15 seconds to upgrade the controllers inside their storage array. It first upgrades the “passive” controller then takes over as primary so it can upgrade the “active” controller. This process takes around 15 seconds and during the switch over all network access is disabled which i understand completely. What raised my and another admins brow was when we asked about data corruption during that upgrade window we were just told it won’t happen. He didn’t explain why it won’t happen or what in iSCSI is able to handle the lag in communication. He only said it won’t happen.
I’m sorry but I have had to eat my own words too many times in the past by putting faith in a product only to have it let us down and I just will not do that with my companies data. Just think if we all put blind faith into something a sales rep said and never questioned anything. We’d all be wearing Bill Gates t-shirts and blindly upgrading our desktops to the newest and latest from redmond.
And I was going to mention how immature I think it is that some companies so directly attack their competition instead of relying on facts, but then I remembered who is involved. Guess those in Texas just handle things differently.
Well as meetings progress and executives sit impatiently, our D.R. plan is slowly coming together. Having to test and choose products is always a great learning experience, though doing this with deadlines takes some of the fun away.
We’ve already sat through the presentations from Lefthand and Equallogic since we’ve narrowed our choices for our production SAN down to these two venders. Just from meeting the reps from both of these companies, I’d have to say that the Lefthand guys seem more down to earth and know what the hell they are talking about. The Equallogic reps we’ve had out are just salesmen who have had minor hardware training and only answer questions with generic answers. The Lefthand guys do this for a living and for fun it seems, the Equallogic guys are just salesmen, period.
One of the biggest downsides for us with Equallogic was that when it comes down to upgrading the firmware on the modules, it will take down network connectivity for 15 seconds while it switchs over to the secondary controller inside the array. I don’t know about other companies and how they would handle their SAN being down for 15 seconds a couple times a year but I’ll pass. With Lefthand, because of their network RAID design, no downtime is required. I’d have to say we’re leaning very heavily towards Lefthand for the SAN purchase.
We’ve settled on VMware 3.5 for our virtualization needs. Virtual Iron will hopefully make it into our plans some day but they just aren’t mature enough for what we need. I’d like to actually use the licenses we’ve purchased for Virtual Iron to create a testing lab for our dept since we just don’t have space for phsyical machines.
And I finally found the time to install and configure Cacti to replace Servers Alive. The newest release from CactiEZ is really the best and easiest solution i’ve found for the price paid, FREE! The features that cacti has and the plugins available really do compare to most enterprise solutions that cost a bucket full of cash. I have almost all of our servers setup and am going through networking equipment to add as needed. In the past if a developer said they needed a new server because a current server just couldn’t handle the load, we would just buy it. Now with performance monitoring and tracking I can ask them to prove the need. In the past month i’ve had to pull statistics on a few servers for this exact reason.