In my previous company I had the opportunity to work with a HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure. It was a very nice piece of equipment. It provided a fully power and network-redundant backplane, albeit at a premium. Easy to manage, and took up only 10 U’s for 16 servers.
I’m looking to implement a similar solution at the new place, and in the interest of due diligence and curiosity I decided to look into the Dell solution. On paper, it looks promising: sips less power than the HP, has a nice feature set, actually looks a little nicer than the HP chassis.
I set up a meeting with my Dell SMB rep to spec out a system with a Blade server specialist. I like what I’m hearing so far — six redundant power supplies, iKVM, DRAC (aka HP’s iLO2).
We come to the dreaded switch question. I’ve heard stories about this before.
Okay, it was one story. But we all know if there’s one major weakness in Dell’s product line, it’s the switches. They may be good, they may be getting better, but the enterprise industry in general doesn’t trust in them much yet. At least from what I’ve seen. They’ll buy Dell rack servers, they’ll buy the storage solutions, but they look to Cisco or HP to provide their network infrastructure.
Anyhow, back to my conversation.
I ask about putting in switch modules in the back. 10GBe over copper (CX4) interconnects. I tell him I’m getting an EqualLogic PS5000XV and it’s going directly into those switch modules.
He stops me right there. “Those switch modules will hold that SAN back. I recommend you use pass-through and connect the Blades to another [Non-Dell] switch”.
I was a little taken back. One of the bigger reasons I’m going with a Blade enclosure is because of that 10 GBe backplane. No wires. If anything, it made my life easier. I was even more surprised that Dell would be actually telling me that their switches would not be a fit. Honesty is good and fair in this business and I respect that he told me that.
But I knew he was wrong. The EqualLogic will work with commodity switches — it’s all about how you configure your network. If it’s a standard enterprise-level switch that supports things like jumbo frames, VLANs, it’ll do the job.
Perhaps I’m expecting a systems guy to know networks, but I’m no network engineer either. I think Dell just needs to have a better line when it comes to their switches, especially now that they own and sell EqualLogic which will be heavily dependent on those switches in the future.
When it’s all said and done, the price was about the same — I know the HP system well and am comfortable with it, so I’m deciding to go the HP route. But I can’t say that this conversation didn’t have a factor in ruling out Dell. The sad part is, I really did go into it willing to give Dell a shot at the business. The technology was all there, I think no one at Dell really thought about how they needed to sell it.
I’m sorry, iSCSI storage and switches go hand in hand. It doesn’t make sense for Dell to tout their servers and storage and bury their network line at a distant third. Pump up the technology, pump up the sales routine and let’s see what happens. That’s my hope.