There’s two big buzzwords in my industry nowadays: virtualization, and iSCSI. Both are related to some degree, as iSCSI SANs seems to work well with VMWare. VMotion now even lets you hot-swap a VM from one hardware to another without shutting it down.
So “routeable storage” seems to be the future of the industry — Fiber Channel is just too expensive and FCoE seem a long ways from being mainstream.
I deal with an EqualLogic (Now Dell) PS series at work and it’s been fantastic thus far. Performance has been admirable (although it’d be nice if we had planned a storage switch network before implementation), and we initiate from a dozen different servers. Administration is dead-simple.
There’s a lot of things we use that I think we didn’t need — but the SAN is worth its weight in gold. The fact that the entirety of our SQL, network files and development data sits on a fully redundant RAID 10 array allows me to sleep a little more soundly at night.
Update: Meta-props back to the folks at the Inside IT Blog at Dell, who gave this a mention on their blog. Let me re-iterate my genuine support for EqualLogic. I like that they don’t nickle-and-dime us for extra things like the Auto-Snapshot Manager and software updates. You buy an EqualLogic and they’ll support you until the end for free. I really, really hope that they never change this model. One of the biggest reasons why I look in their direction whenever I need to recommend an iSCSI storage solution.
I am in no way shape or form affiliated with Dell, EqualLogic or ArsTechnica. I’m a member of the Ars forums and as a vendor-agnostic consultant I always look for products and solutions that give the best value for my clients.