Alignment with Microsoft
With the introduction of Microsoft Hyper-V, server virtualization becomes truly pervasive, reaching all segments of the IT market. With Hyper-V, the need for innovative, cost-effective storage solutions that can simplify SAN deployments and provide enterprise reliability becomes even more apparent. The Dell/EqualLogic PS Series provides a fully virtualized storage infrastructure that delivers high-availability, resiliency, flexibility, and scalability that is simple and cost efficient to deploy, manage and grow.

Delivering an Enterprise-Class Server/Storage Infrastructure
The PS Series iSCSI SAN provides a high performance, consolidated storage platform particularly effective in virtualized server environments. Data volumes are automatically provisioned from a single, scalable pool of storage that leverages all storage resources within the SAN. Even as workload demands shift or migrate between virtual servers and their physical host servers, the PS Series SAN automatically applies storage resources where and when needed without intervention or manual tuning. And as you add PS Series Arrays, automatic load balancing extends across all arrays for even better performance.

In the Microsoft Hyper-V environment, performance is further optimized by advanced IO multipathing integrated into standard Microsoft iSCSI drivers, developed by Dell engineering to optimally configure and enable the EqualLogic peer storage architecture, automatically monitoring and load balancing I/O across multiple arrays, network ports, and storage connections. Intelligent SAN balancing significantly improves the quality of load balancing, as path activity levels can be monitored and I/O loads shifted from heavily trafficked to less congested paths. The result: optimal performance automatically and easier management.

Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft Edition Protects Virtualized Transactional Workloads
Many organizations are looking to deploy mission-critical transactional database applications (such as Microsoft SQL Server) within a virtual server, however protecting these applications can be challenging. With high I/O and constantly changing information, making clean and consistent volume copies for backup and disaster recovery is difficult. The PS Series iSCSI solution automates these practices by including Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft Edition (ASM/ME) with every array. With ASM/ME, administrators can simply and easily create clean, consistent, hardware based snapshots of application datasets that are quickly and easily recoverable to prior points in time. ASM/ME also integrates with standard backup software using the Microsoft VSS framework enabling you integrate into your standard backup processes and confidently deploy and protect transactional database applications in a virtualized IT environment.