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.

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.

Sponsored by Dell and chalk full of IT guys who know and like what they’re talking about.  Always a good thing.

I spent a good chunk of my day reading about the future of iSCSI and BTU calculations.  I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time on this forum.

Considering how saturated the cell network gets during emergencies and how little bandwidth it takes to send SMS text messages, this is a great way to inform the masses. I hope emergency management departments realize this and start including text messages to cell phones on top of its reverse-911 protocol to inform residents of evacuation procedures.

One of the biggest lessons we have to learn from this fire is to better distribute the information in a multi-site emergency. While good I believe the response could be much improved in reducing the information delay. I had to really dig to find out what was happening *now*, refreshing news websites, comment threads, etc.

My thoughts are out to everyone who has been displaced. May they be safe.