With props to uber volunteers Dustin and Tom (and his son), Ed and I reconfig'd a good portion of the server rack to make a home for the 2 Cisco switches and EqualLogic PS100E chassis Thursday night.
It took way longer to move, rack/rerack stuff, config the switches than actually setting up the PS100E. We also had to install Gigabit network cards in 3 of the servers (2 per server) since our older Dell PowerEdge server NICs did not support jumbo frames...which iSCSI utilizes.
Here are a couple un-high quality photos from my Treo700w ...
Cisco 2960G switches, EqualLogic PS100E empty, 1 250GB drive
Rear shot of the 100E. Redundant everything ... dual controllers, dual power supplies, dual fan modules
Racked up, drives in, and powered up ... man, this thing moves a TON of air
Rear of PS100E and shot of Cisco switches. These switches are only for communication between the PS100E and dedicated SAN NICs on each server (2 per server for fault tolerance and load balancing). We're using Microsoft's free iSCSI initiator to link the servers to the SAN.
Pretty much we've eliminated all possible single points of failure. We even have each SAN switch and PS100E power supply plugged into difference UPS units.
The rack is a mess with cables everywhere now, but we'll worry about making it pretty once everything is cranking along as planned. By the time we had everything communicating it was 2am...so we decided to call it quits and head home.
More to follow...
Mind if I stop by for a peek?
Posted by: Joshua Gregory | July 08, 2006 at 12:23 AM
Jason,
Any plans for your old switches? Dave, our IT Manager and I will be out for the round table in September. We'd be happy to take your old switches off your hands. Just in case you didn't have any plans for them.
Todd
Posted by: Todd Colucy | July 08, 2006 at 07:41 AM
Josh - take a peek anytime. Jeff G or Adam C have keys if Ed or I are not around.
Todd - We only added 2 additional switches so nothing was removed. Sorry :-)
Posted by: Jason Powell | July 08, 2006 at 10:08 AM
Jason, dude! That is sweet! thanks for the most killer church technical blog on the web!
Posted by: Chad Nygren | July 08, 2006 at 06:45 PM
She looks beautiful.
Posted by: Marcus Monroe | July 09, 2006 at 12:51 PM
Was the box you bought, one of the ones they just discontinued?
They have just stopped production of most of their units as they move to SAS.
Last years model?
Posted by: Jim Magrish | July 14, 2006 at 09:31 AM
Hello Jason,
I'm the CEO of EqualLogic and am writing to reply to Mr. Magrish's comment. He is mistaken.
Mr. Magrish may be confused because we recently discontinued one of our other products, the PS200E. We did that because the 400Gig disk drives we used were discontinued by the drive manufacturer in 2005. We replaced that system in Sept-05 with a higher-capacity 500Gig disk drive system, the PS300E, but continued the PS200 until recently to make the transition easier for our customers.
There are over 100 PS systems just like yours (well, it's a mix of PS100 and PS300s) in final testing about 150 feet from my office. There are many more than that in various stages of assembly.
It's even more important to note that all EqualLogic systems work together, regardless of disk type or hardware generation. Our latest software release works on all the systems we have shipped over the past 3 years - spanning many different types of disk drives and two generations of controllers. We are relentlessly focused on investment protection for our customers.
Thanks for this open forum. I'm glad I found your blog in time to put our sales team directly in contact with you!
Posted by: Don Bulens | July 14, 2006 at 11:49 AM
Is there a particular reason you didn't consider/overlooked the small EMC range?
I know there is limits on hosts (max of 10 PHYSICAL (aka virtual is freegame)) but the list prices (CDW/etc) on an iSCSI AX150 with redudant power/controllers and 6 TB of disk space is right at 12'000$. And its ok with ESX - with which it works well.
On the really-cheap range you also have the Promise M500i iSCSI box (available from newegg, etc) that you can do iscsi for between 6 and 9K depending on how much storage you want. These work good for Video Storage Archives
Fan of the blog btw.
Posted by: Karl | September 26, 2006 at 11:54 AM