Storage @ Work

Two guys, Eric Waters and Ron Whitling running the data center operations for E-Chx, an Internet payroll processing service provider, talking about how EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage solved their performance problems on SQL Server and the overall ease of use and operations that you get with an EqualLogic SAN.

This is my first YouTube video and therefore also the first time linking a video directly into my blog. It didn't exactly work perfectly and there are several rough edges that I expect to make better in the future. The video ends at the 6 minute mark, but extends into blackness for over an additional minute. I'm not sure why that happened..... Don't be surprised if I re-post this one with a better quality video later this week.

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Previously I blogged about Solimar Systems and how they've been a customer for a long time and upgraded the disk drives on an early EqualLogic storage system to new 750 GB drives. So, I made a short video that - well - is somewhat self explanatory. Solimar Systems is a terrific customer with an interesting business and the story is pretty good, the sushi was fresh, but this video leaves a bit to be desired. Here goes:

We really do have the greatest customers! We love 'em. In this interview, an IT administrator at a major university (the hat is not an indication by the way) talks about running out of storage and discovering iSCSI and EqualLogic. This is actually my first video and my interviewing was atrocious, which led to a lot of choppy edits getting my noise out of the way. Whatever, our customer tells a pretty interesting story of putting his reputation on the line when he reported that that performance with an EqualLogic SATA storage system was better than with high-speed internal SCSI drives. He runs VMware, Oracle, SQL Server, Red Hat and SAS on top of his EqualLogic iSCSI SATA system.

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I was in the city of Chicago this week to celebrate the season of road repair and the 17 year Cicada cycle. Whoa to both of those things. Oh yes, I also spent time with customers. Thanks loads to Mike, Jim, John, Jeremy and Scott for taking the time out of your schedules and braving the lane shifts and toll booth heists to spend time with us.

Here's a video of a customer of ours who was eager to tell his story. Microsoft shop, insurance industry, SQL Server is their bread and butter and Exchange is a key business enabler for them. They use snapshots and replication too.

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Kirk Goodwin the IT Manager at Unicity - and James Rupprecht, the Storage SE at Valcom in Salt Lake City talk about their success working together on the installation of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.

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I caught up with Chris Fricke, from Clackamas County Oregon and we were talking. I like to say we have the greatest customers in the world and in this video, Chris shows why I say that. Thanks Chris!

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Chris Sims from the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia was a panelist at VMworld today and he talks about their DR setup, VMware implementation and their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Like I always say, we have the best customers and it is a joy to work with customers like Chris.

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Carmine Iannace is the IT director at the Brattle Group , an economics consulting firm in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an early implementer of VMware technology at Welch's before bringing his virtualization vision to the Brattle Group, where he has almost completely converted their IT infrastructure to virtual systems and storage. I interviewed Carmine last week when I was in Boston and he spoke about his use of virtualization and the role that EqualLogic iSCSI storage has in it, including its deployment in their European lights-out data centers and its DR role, performing remote data replication.

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Ezra Wiesner from the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia talks about using EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage for their SQL server and video applications. The audio on this interview is a bit screwed up - my apologies.

Check out their online media player for events and artists appearing during the 2007-2008 season. Extremely cool!

Note: The web video service I use for this blog appears to be having some performance problems - I don't know how long this will last.

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In this interview, Mark Solyst, Network Administrator at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital and avid snowmobiler in the high country of Montana talks about the applications they are using with their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage systems: Our PS series arrays are storing data for their:

File servers
SQL servers
Exchange servers
Backup
Snapshot
Remote replication

They have two EqualLogic systems on their campus and are replicating data between the two for disaster protection.

Another key DR product that Mark mentions is the Veritas Continuous Protection Service. Its worth noting that because there are lots of ways our products work alongside other products that people use for data protection.

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Bryan Johnson is a customer of ours in Dallas. He spoke to me after a recent user group meeting there. They are using their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN to storage data for their Microsoft shop - Exchange. SQL Server and remote replication.

Our customers tell our story better than we can

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Don Wilkins is one of our earliest customers and has been running his Oracle environment on EqualLogic iSCSI SANs for several years. Here is is giving his thoughts on Dell's planned acquisition of EqualLogic.

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Thanks for your comments Don.

PCL Construction in Edmonton is one of the largest construction companies in North America - and they are employee owned, which means employees there are always looking for ways to be more efficient.

They became EqualLogic customers 3 years ago after having been a Fibre Channel shop prior to that. They can run everything they need to on Dell EqualLogic storage and like the ease of use and flexibility that our advanced virtualization architecture gives them. I have a video on my InsideIT blog where Derek Knox from PCL speaks at the VMware forum in San Jose about doing live data migrations while upgrading his systems.

In video below, Derek and David Howse talk about the simplicity of using Dell EqualLogic storage and SRM. Derek talks about how they get performance equal to that of their Fibre Channel SANs. Some of that comes from having a smart SAN infrastructure, but a lot comes from the design of EqualLogic arrays. FWIW, most of the new systems they are buying today have SAS drives, to give them even more overhead for their high performance applications.