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Dell EqualLogic winner of InfoWorld's best storage system of 2011

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"Dell’s assessment helped explain central processing unit (CPU) spikes that we’d seen at different times of the day. We were able to quickly resolve these issues. Dell showed us that we could move 70 physical servers to a virtualized environment on four Dell PowerEdge hosts and Dell EqualLogic storage." - Andrew Robinson, Head of IT Operations and Data, Ai Claims Solutions
  4PS
“The blend of EqualLogic and Symantec technology provides peace of mind that our data is well protected.” - Tom Zuijdwegt, development manager, 4PS
“We use the Auto-Snapshot Manager tool that came with our Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series SANs to restore data quickly. This gives us peace of mind that our data is protected at all times.” - Michel Sebag, chief information officer, A.L. Filter
"The EqualLogic SANs are incredibly easy to use. We can very quickly create a point-in-time snapshot, do all our work on it, upgrade it and then roll it out to production. A major system upgrade that would have previously taken three people a week can be done by our server administrator in one day." - Christopher Patti, Director of Technology, AccuWeather, Inc.
“We’ve successfully used VMware Infrastructure 3 and Dell EqualLogic storage arrays to reshape our IT infrastructure and make it more adaptable to business goals like high availability and disaster recovery.” - Shane Fontenot, Network Technician, Acme Truck Line, Inc.
"The Dell EqualLogic PS5000E is highly reliable and simple to manage. It arrived pre-assembled so implementation was easy. It’s the perfect storage solution for our lab environment and a cost-efficient alternative to a fibre channel SAN" - Ivan Franckaert, Senior System Administrator, ACV-CSC
"Dell’s assessment helped explain central processing unit (CPU) spikes that we’d seen at different times of the day. We were able to quickly resolve these issues. Dell showed us that we could move 70 physical servers to a virtualized environment on four Dell PowerEdge hosts and Dell EqualLogic storage." - Andrew Robinson, Head of IT Operations and Data, Ai Claims Solutions
"Tiered storage is a really big win for us – we just plug it in, and anything we need will migrate there automatically. We can scale independently according to our needs." - Andy Monroe, Vice President of Technology, AirClic, Inc.
“The reliability of the new Dell environment has given us the confidence to virtualize our core applications. We’ve gained the performance we need to deliver our IT goals with fewer physical servers."
"When we were evaluating the Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SANs, it was easy to see how they made virtualization easier with a smaller footprint." - Tim Maliyil, President, Data Guard Systems and AlertBoot
"We can make servers available extremely quickly if our developers need a new machine or need to test something. We can also clone a server or database from our EqualLogic SAN within one or two minutes to streamline development work, which was impossible before." - Markus Hacklaender, Head of IT, ALFOTEC
"With virtualized Dell servers and Dell EqualLogic storage, we have a simple-to-maintain platform that we can expand without increasing management time. As revenues and end users grow, we can continue to meet the needs of the business, all without hiring additional IT staff." - Zheng Junhao, vice president of information technology, AmTran
“We have consolidated our server environment by around 50 per cent and now plan to virtualize more servers. With the enhanced memory of the Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server, we gain excellent VMware ESXi 4.1 performance.” — Samer Awajan, Chief Technology Officer, Aramex
"It’s just the elegance of the technology – I’m impressed every time I use it. We can do so much more than ever before. Anything that we want to store and replicate is going on the SAN." - Bob Munson, Network Engineer, Bay Cove
When you’re deploying a clone without the Dell EqualLogic Firmware 5.0, the data goes from the array to the VMware ESXi host, then back down to the array. With the new firmware and vSphere 4.1, the SAN creates the clone, eliminating the need to copy all that data.
"To make our cloud services work, it’s crucial that we respond quickly to clients’ needs. With Dell EqualLogic, we have a highly scalable storage system that we can expand in minutes. We’re able to react instantly to changes in circumstances." -Lars Wormer, Technical Consultant, BOSTER
“When we actually ran our tests on EqualLogic iSCSI, we were absolutely blown away by the results. EqualLogic was head and shoulders above the rest.” Brad Blake, Chief Technology Officer, Boston Medical Center
When we actually ran our tests on EqualLogic iSCSI, we were absolutely blown away by the results. EqualLogic was head and shoulders above the rest
"We wanted to put a solution in place that would remove the load that spam was placing on our network and Exchange server. When I found out that Dell EMS also offers email archiving and email continuity as part of the package, I was sold." - Tony Lux, Purveyor of Technology, Boulevard Brewing Company
“We’re seeing a tremendous performance increase over the previous version—backups took half the time they used to in one of the tests we ran when backing up to the same Dell PowerVault tape library." - Lee R. Jordan, Jr., Chief Information Officer and District Technology Coordinator
“When we recently added the PS6000XV, it wasn't so much that we needed more capacity right away, but that we wanted the additional I/O and processing power that stacking the EqualLogic arrays give us. It's really nice to just be able to throw another array in the pool and get a substantial increase in our available I/O, so that we're not dropping off on performance of Oracle or other applications where we've already committed to a certain level of performance.” — Jeff Stanley, Boys Town
"Pretty much everything is included in the price of our SAN, in particular the software used to divide data, create and manage snapshots, replicate data, clone volumes and manage the I/O. Other vendors force you to buy additional licenses for these functionalities." - Wim Diersen, Financial Manager, Bribus Keukens
“ We’re able to put out the big-iron projects because of the expertise and solutions that we’ve been able to leverage from Dell.” Matthew Blevins, director of network operations, Brivo Systems
We reduced our server footprint by around 52 per cent using Dell and gained a more energyefficient infrastructure for greener IT.
“Today, if a virtual machine experiences an operating system error, it reboots very quickly," says Evans. "If a physical server has a problem, Hyper-V will automatically load balance across the shared hosts, and that causes no interruption. We were probably offering 99.9 percent uptime before, and since server virtualization, we’re at 99.999 percent easily for services that are part of our virtual environment.” — Chad Evans, Manager, Information Technology Services, Canadore College
  CAOZ
"We wanted high processing speeds, stability and a good price–performance ratio. We looked at Dell, HP and IBM, and found that Dell offered the best value." - Arnar Gunnarsson, Computer Graphics Supervisor, CAOZ
“Across our fleet, the combination of VMware running on efficient Dell servers with EqualLogic storage arrays is proving to be a green solution, while also greatly reducing the cost of running our ships’ critical applications.” - Doug Eney, Vice President,Information Systems Engineering, Carnival Cruise Lines
“Across our fleet, the combination of VMware running on efficient Dell servers with EqualLogic storage arrays is proving to be a green solution, while also greatly reducing the cost of running our ships’ critical applications.” - Doug Eney, Vice President,Information Systems Engineering, Carnival Cruise Lines
We needed a complete infrastructure, and Dell delivered a flawless technical solution with excellent total cost of owenership (TCO). Dell was responsible for helping CART to go live with its two central offices, nine toll plazas and partners within the government’s required timeframe.
“We soon realised that Dell understood our industry – everything from the technology needed to design an F1™ car, to our requirement for trackside laptops and storage that could withstand extreme temperatures and vibrations.” - Bill Peters, Head of IT, Caterham F1 Team, United Kingdom and Malaysia
"I was used to paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for snapshots and replication, and with EqualLogic these are built in. With other solutions, to buy a system even capable of adding that functionality would start at six figures – and that's before the software." - Bob Maiers, IT Manager, Chicago Records Management
"EqualLogic storage equipment work right out of the box, and is the best I have ever seen for simply working as advertised. I have not had a single problem with the PS Series SAN in three years; it is so simple to operate and maintain that I almost forget its there. EqualLogic successfully replaced a cumbersome and expensive Fibre Channel storage system, and we have never looked back. EqualLogic is that good." - Chris Fricke, Senior Microcomputer Specialist, Clackamas County
“Our virtual environment offers high availability, and the combination of Dell servers with Intel processors and Dell EqualLogic storage arrays is providing great performance. We’ve been able to consolidate our systems so that we can run 35 servers in our data center, when 35 physical servers would never have fit. The Dell-based solution has met all of our objectives, and it will support the company as we grow.” - Rafael Gonçalves, IT Specialist
"EqualLogic is so simple to use that you can begin to see ROI almost instantly in terms of usage and maintenance. Everything EqualLogic says about its implementation is true: design, setup and management have never been easier. The best benefit is that our faculty and staff love the robustness and 100 percent uptime of the new e-mail and calendaring functions." - Joe Volesky, Windows Services Group Leader, CSU Academic Computing and Networking Services Department
"We minimise disruption to the business because we can make data available to staff quickly with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager and the EqualLogic SANs." - Carsten Boenke, System Administrator, Commerz Real
"When we were evaluating SANs, only EqualLogic sent us a demo device. More impressive is that once we received the device we only needed to call EqualLogic to acquire the initial password. We tested creating volumes, snapshots, and performed restores within minutes of powering on the PS Series array." - Derek Longdo, IT Manager, Community Health Partnership, Inc.
“I don’t have to log on to the Dell EqualLogic SAN more than twice a week. I wouldn’t have time to manage operations if it weren’t for Dell EqualLogic and virtualization.” - Adam Mikolajczyk, IT manager, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
“We did a lot of work with HP in the past, but today many of our customers indicate a preference for the Dell product line. Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SANs are the most cost-effective and full-featured storage products available, so 99 percent of the time, that’s what we propose.”
"Like us, most of our customers can’t wait 10-12 hours to load and run backup tapes, to retrieve data, but the PS Series arrays render backup process instantaneously. Not only is this capability critical in case something goes wrong, but it also provides savings in terms of the time and effort it takes to manage a daily backup process." - Paul Vagnozzi, Vice President and CTO, Cypress Corporation
"Our Dell EqualLogic SANs are a foundational piece of our overall IT consolidation and simplification initiative. We’re looking forward to reinvesting the time that we save in providing new services for the Deeley team." - Brent Fawcett, Manager, Technical Services, Deeley Harley-Davidson® Canada
“Breaking down the silos between pools of resources and between the physical and virtual worlds gives you a lot more flexibility. It doesn't matter whether the hypervisor is VMware, Microsoft or Xen - we're treating all of the physical and virtual servers uniformly as compute resources.” — Jonathan Senger, Enterprise Architect, Dell
“We’re able to use standard networking components, with no Fibre Channel host bus adapters to worry about. In addition to allowing us to deploy faster, using iSCSI storage instead of Fibre Channel reduces deployment costs significantly.” - Brian K. Totten, Systems Engineer III, Dell Inc
“Dell not only offers high-quality, timely support, but does so at a global level. It provides the ideal mix of quality, efficiency and problem-solving - wherever we are.” — Rauno De Pasquale, IT Manager, deltatre
"In these regards, EqualLogic exceeded expectations. EqualLogic products met the County's technical requirements and were very competitively priced. EqualLogic staff were knowledgeable, flexible, and easy to work with." - Kevin Furlong, Technology Division Manager, Deschutes County
“The hotels we work with maintain the highest standards for their guests, and they expect the same from us. The great thing about EqualLogic is that performance increases as more units are added to the SAN.” -Mohamed Raafat Atia, Technical Services Manager, Digital Solutions Provider
“Over the past 15 years, we grew our physical server farm until we reached 25 servers. Many of them had provided four or more years of continuous service 24x7. We wanted to prepare our company for the next five years and decided to virtualize all our servers. By virtualizing, we knew that we would improve performance and simplify administration.” - Alvaro A. Sagrera, Director of Technology, Grupo Dutriz
"Our objective was Simple SAN, and only EqualLogic fit this picture perfectly; all the other solutions eventually involved excessive management costs or were found to be too complex. As an IT manager, you have other things on your mind. None of the other evaluated systems did what they had to do, namely, provide ease of implementation and being operational within the space of one week..." - Luc Lowet, Consultant, Encare ICT
"The Dell team worked with the suppliers to ensure we had everything we needed before the move. Dell understood how important this move was to us, and it gave us a great feeling to know they had us covered.” - Dan Petlon, vice president, IT and quality assurance, Enterasys
"If we want to extend the SAN, we can add another Dell EqualLogic array and instantly have another three terabytes of storage, without any configuration. The performance of the SAN will grow in line with its expansion." - Daniel Loughlin, Network Manager, Esher College
  ETOS
“Based on the promise of enterprise-quality storage for lower cost, we had decided to investigate an iSCSI storage system. Consolidate IT presented an EqualLogic PS Series storage array for us to test for one week, and the results were amazing. Not only was it a stable system, but it eliminated the complexity of managing a SAN, which had been both expensive and difficult to scale..." - Edwin Idema, IT Director at Ahold, Etos
  Five
"Being able to trust the automatic management and performance optimisation of our PS Series SAN allows my IT team to focus on other priorities, including the continual enhancement of content and applications. This is critical for our success as a business in the digital world." - Ken Davis, CIO, Five
"I needed to design and implement an entire IT infrastructure for Flagler. Having been in management for the past four years, I had very little hands on experience, but I was able to install and configure the EqualLogic SAN in less than 45 minutes. That’s a credit to the product being easy to use as well as to EqualLogic's excellent technical support." - Fred Infurchia, Director of IT, Flagler Construction Equipment, LLC
“We've become more competitive, and our Dell Certified status contributes greatly in that area. Last year, we were named to the Dallas 100 Fastest Growing Companies list due primarily to the increase in overall sales from our Dell relationship.” — Wade Yeaman, Founder and CEO, Fluid Consulting
"By linking server and storage virtualisation together, we can protect our infrastructure against the risk of failure while also cutting our management overheads. Overall, I estimate that this project has saved up to £100,000 in staff costs, hardware savings and power bills." - Ken Kaban, Technology Services Manager, Foster’s EMEA
"The PS Series array has had a very positive impact on our faculty’s ability to innovate and to meet student needs. We are a forward-thinking institution, and we need technology solutions that are equally progressive. EqualLogic’s technology fits our way of thinking." - Joanne Kossuth, CIO, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
“The time we previously spent on administration and maintenance we can now devote to research and development for solutions to increase the value of the business. The Dell server consolidation and virtualization solution has been enormously successful.” - Leandro Fontana, IT Manager, Fresenius Kabi Brazil
"The Dell EqualLogic SANs have improved our recovery point object and recovery time objective by 100 percent. They also reduced backup times from two-to-three days to four-to-five hours." - Francisco Diaz Neira, Database Administrator and Capacity Planning Executive
"Our main selection criteria were that the system had to be IP-based, provide ease of management and maintenance and involve purchasing costs that fit our budget." - Marcel Ningen, Information Provision and Automation Team Coordinator, Gemeente Leek
“Much to our surprise, the EqualLogic unit outperformed both the NetApp 3020s and EMC Clariion by leaps and bounds – so much so that we ran the test again. One of the other vendors actually sent in a specialist to make sure that things were configured right. After the second test, the other vendor’s gear was still not faster.” - Jason Skeffington, Senior Systems Analyst, GHS Data Management
"We had our SAN up and running in half the time it took to deploy our previous storage system. In the past, our team spent a lot of time fixing basic issues, however with the Dell EqualLogic SAN, it looks after itself." - Dai Uzui, director, systems maintenance, GMO Media
“When you include time for installation, data migration, and the staff resources required to manage it, the Dell EqualLogic SAN solution will easily save us 50% in total cost of ownership.” - Anurag Choube, General Manager, IT Solutions and Telecommunications, Godawari Power & ISPAT Ltd Brad Blake, Chief Technology Officer, Boston Medical Center
“In case of a data centre failure at one of our local offices, the combined PS Series/DPM 2007 solution will allow us to recover the IT infrastructure and make it available to our employees again in a matter of hours.” - Erik ten Winkel, Chief Technology Officer, Grontmij
"The ease of use and scalability really stood out with the Dell EqualLogic and PowerVault storage solution." - Karsten Steen Sørensen, Group Vice President
We realised that to obtain the greatest benefit from virtualization, we needed to evaluate our entire nfrastructure. The demonstration confirmed that we could maximise the impact of virtualizing our servers by moving to a Dell EqualLogic SAN
It took just 30 minutes to get the Dell Equal Logic PS5000e SANs install ed in the datacentre. Since then we’ve found them extremely intuitive and packedwith the functionality we need." - Ian Phillips , assistant head and director of ICT , Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School
"We’ve calculated that our disk back up with the Dell PowerVault appliance is at least 40 percent faster than we previously experienced with tape.”
"Being in the thick of tornado country, we wanted a product that could meet our growing need for protected data storage, with a reliable backup process and excellent performance. Previously, we had about 30 servers located at 16 different locations throughout the district. With EqualLogic storage, now we are able to provide consolidated storage with improved reliability..." - Keith Price, Chief Technology Officer, Hoover City Schools
“We chose a Dell EqualLogic PS6000E solution because it gave us 20 per cent greater throughput than competing devices, and it was simple to manage.” - Jörg Ehrhart, Chief Executive Officer, IPX Server
“The Dell PowerVault SAN was a real workhorse that delivered high availability for several years. But as we have continued to grow, the Dell IT Consulting team assessed our changing needs and recommended a Dell EqualLogic SAN. The Dell EqualLogic SAN has native snapshot and replication capabilities that we believe will be even more resilient than our existing solution. We can provide stronger data protection and disaster recovery while simplifying administration.” - Matthew Woodings, CTO
"Using Dell AIM, we can provision all 12 servers approximately in three minutes instead of two hours, just by assigning each server a specific AIM persona." - Tom Hall, Enterprise Technical Support Advisor, Dell Inc
“Using our own technology, we were able to bring this consolidation to market faster, reduce costs and greatly simplify data center management.” - David Crockett, Senior Systems Engineer, Dell Inc
"Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage systems are the perfect fit for our deployment model," says Brooks. "PS Series systems provide virtualized storage resources that adjust dynamically according to changing application needs, without manual intervention. The PS Series also provides easy scalability, which is essential for protecting our investment." - Matt Brooks, Senior Enterprise Architect, Dell IT Group
“Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage systems are the perfect fit for our deployment model. "PS Series systems provide virtualized storage resources that adjust dynamically according to changing application needs, without manual intervention. The PS Series also provides easy scalability, which is essential for protecting our investment.” - Matt Brooks, Senior Enterprise Architect, Dell IT Group
"The EqualLogic SAN has exceeded our performance requirements, and being able to manage storage while applications remain online means much less disruption. Our business is about speeding up cycles–and the PS Series fits in perfectly with that concept." - Tom Kirby, IT Manager, Hypnion
"We’re no longer buying physical servers for each customer. Our shared, virtual infrastructure from Citrix and Dell lets us instantaneously ramp up when we need to, which drives our costs down and makes us more competitive." - Jaime Schmidtke, IT Systems Manager, I-Business Network LLC
"Dell consultants advised us on virtualization and Dell’s alliance with VMware was fundamental to the project running smoothly." - Iñaki Calvo, Chief Executive Officer, ICM Netsystems
“Cloud infrastructure accounts for 95 percent of our growth over the past two years. The high availability and simplified, fast scalability of the Dell PowerEdge and Dell EqualLogic platform has played a vital role in achieving our customers’ goals.” - Dante Orsini, Vice President of Business Development, iLand.com
"Our Dell EqualLogic test unit performed better than our Fibre Channel SAN," "In the end, our decision came down to two iSCSI SAN vendors," "Dell won our business based on the EqualLogic pricing model. The other vendor charges extra for every additional feature you use, and these costs add up very quickly. Essential features such as replication and thin provisioning came standard with Dell EqualLogic systems." - Sajid Hasan, Director of Technology Operations, Infinite Energy
"Since we installed the EqualLogic SAN, we have not had a single issue to report. The array makes us much more flexible in responding to business needs, and the management software included covers all of our requirements. EqualLogic’s array is so simple to work with, and it saves a lot of grief when it comes to managing our storage.” - Colin Dash, IT Manager, Ink Publishing
"The biggest impact to our business is streamlining our operations, and that meanscost savings. We can provide our customers with flexibility and services they have never had before." - Jeff Stein, Service Delivery Manager, InteleNet
“The virtualized solution from Dell optimizes our server usage and increases the utilization rate of the Intel processors from around five to six percent, up to 60 to 70 percent. Since deploying the Dell solution, we have benefited from a sizeable 25 percent reduction in utility costs.”
"One month after deploying our Dell EqualLogic SAN, we calculated a 150 per cent rise in images served per day, and a corresponding increase in site visits." - Rui Matos, Systems Administrator, Janela Digital
"With fibre channel, it’s difficult to expand, so you try to figure out what you’ll need in the future – and often end up with too little or too much. It’s not efficient. But the PS Series architecture scales so easily, I can buy when I need capacity – and that helps me better manage my budget as well as my storage." - Mark Rivard, Network Systems Specialist, Johnson Health Network
"iSCSI really is the sweet spot. VMware and EqualLogic make it possible for any organization – not just large corporations with deep pockets – to implement a high-availability, disaster-proof infrastructure." - David Siles, CTO, Kane County
"We are generally vendor neutral and would typically purchase the hardware that would best meet our needs. After a positive evaluation of Dell solutions, we have not looked back." - Shinji Higashi, supervisor, KCCS Platform Group
"Traditional disaster recovery would have added much more complexity to our environment – the EqualLogic/VMware solution gave us DR along with simplicity. We had to develop a solution that would stand up to the rigors of our work and enable us to operate and have data available all the time. With EqualLogic, we get all of that, plus it was a straight forward, cost-effective implementation." - John Rhon, Vice President of Information Systems, LifeLink
“Through virtualization and EqualLogic storage, we're confident that we'll continue to deliver the bandwidth and performance needed by staff and media to match days for years to come. This EqualLogic PS6000X SAN is a powerful but cost-effective storage option that fits perfectly with our new virtualized environment.” — Ken Webster, Head of IT Infrastructure, Liverpool FC
The Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV SAN, connected to the PowerConnect switches, works perfectly to provide access and storage. The solution is so robust that it enables the configuring of any number of SCSI options, and allows for the replication of data, preventing the loss of information in any eventuality
“Before the consolidation, we spend at least 10 hours a week on server administration. With virtualization, it's down to two hours a week. We can power machines on and off, install operating systems, monitor server performance and tweak the virtual infrastructure to address issues - for example, giving a virtual server more RAM - all through the VMware management console.” — Arne Nystrom, Senior Network Administrator Long Beach City College
"Dell EqualLogic SANs make it incredibly easy to provision and manage storage for a VMware cluster. As a result, almost all our new servers get deployed onto the VMware platform.” - Bill Montgomery, Manager of Information Systems, Lulu.com
“A key virtue of the Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN is the utter simplicity of the set-up.” - Jacob Williams, Director of IT, Mahoning County
We’re saving 40 percent with Dell and VMware compared to 30 percent that we would have saved with Terminal Services. Running the two pilots really benefitted us by allowing to see objectively what Dell and VMware had to offer to move from the computer lab paradigm to the level of flexible computing
By moving to virtualized Dell EqualLogic storage, we’re maximising the benefits of our Hyper-V infrastructure. Together, they give us a highly flexible, available platform that helps us respond faster to the needs of students and staff. For hardware, we standardized on Dell. We were already using Dell successfully for our desktops, and we wanted to extend that relationship to our data center." - Martin Lynch, IT Manager, Marino Institute of Education
"It gives us ‘big company’ functionality in our data center while we are still a small business. Our business has many services and numerous components – but the storage is critical, and that’s why we depend on the EqualLogic PS100E. Ultimately, it’s the foundation of our business." - Roger Cass, CTO, MediSync
"Our search turned out to be a simple one because we felt EqualLogic’s virtualization technology and snapshot capabilities were superior to anything else we’ve seen. The snapshot features provide the backup and recovery capabilities we need to run our business, and the bottom line is that we’ve gotten better performance from our PS Series array than we got from our NAS solution, at a fraction of the cost." - Jay Walusek, VP of Server Administration, Mesirow Financial
"EqualLogic’s storage infrastructure really provided a drastic improvement from our past storage environment. The way EqualLogic deals with adding storage provides a much better way then other competitors. EqualLogic has simplified our lives by allowing us to use more sophisticated storage capabilities, without any headaches." - Tony Wyland, Assistant Director of Network Services, Messiah College
“Most vendors presented us with traditional storage options, but Dell’s approach, with Dell EqualLogic storage, stood out as innovative and progressive in its simplicity.” - Frank Sievering, head of IT and processes, Metabo
"The virtual machines are definitely easier to administer than a bunch of physical servers. Virtualization does bring new challenges, such as controlling server sprawl by putting the right policies and procedures in place. But all in all, we’ve reduced the amount of IT staff time spent on server administration by 10 to 15 hours a week—520 to 780 hours per year." - Curtis Oie, Manager of Technology, Millard Refrigerated Services
“We wanted more flexibility and we wanted to spend our money in a way that would be more beneficial to us in the long run. Dell helped us develop a solution that meets our needs using server consolidation, virtualization and cetnralized storage.” — Jonathan Hilland, President & CEO, Mindwave Research
"From the ease of installation to the increased performance, the EqualLogic SAN has exceeded our expectations. We no longer have to manage JBOD, and the performance has been so impressive that we are reconsidering other aspects of our infrastructure in order to take more advantage of the EqualLogic SAN." - Bill Copeland, MIS Director, Missouri Employers Mutual Insurance
"The bottom line is that without the performance of the PS Series array, I would not be in business. Everything I do boils down to money transacting between a business and a buyer – in this two- or three-second process, if I’m a second off, my customers lose a sale and I lose money." - Marc O’Leary, CEO, MyCart
“EqualLogic storage was ideal for a virtualized cloud computing environment, delivering plenty of capacity and seamless expansion.” - Jörg Wiesemann, Project Manager and Infrastructure-Specialist at NAB Solutions
  NASA
"If ten major projects suddenly need to use the system, now they can without breaking the bank. Now we have a simple yet scalable and economical way to meet increasing demand. Most exciting of all, researchers will now be able to find information they didn’t even know existed. We are facilitating scientific exploration by making previously unknown information accessible to those that need it..." - Jeff Seaton, Langley Research Center Chief Technology Officer, NASA
"We needed 100 percent uptime and we couldn’t piece it together using our existing NAS solution, so we selected EqualLogic to create our next-generation storage infrastructure. Now with the EqualLogic SAN in place, we are closer to our goal of 100 percent uptime with little interference from the IT staff. The EqualLogic solution essentially manages itself." - Leland Johnson, Vice President of Information Technology, National Flood Services
“If EqualLogic is good enough for SDC, which supports critical banking services, then it is good enough for us. We were encouraged that EqualLogic could support a company the size of SDC and believed therefore that it would meet our needs as a geographically dispersed organization. We felt EqualLogic was the superior choice because implementing the PS200Es did not require special IT knowledge.” - Lars Andersen, Network Infrastructure Manager, NCC Denmark
For customers, continuity is everything. We can move live volumes between our Dell EqualLogic arrays while we carry out maintenance, and customers don’t even notice. It’s also good to know that the arrays are fully redundant – that’s important for us, even though the SANs have performed without any issues since we installed our first PS5000E two years ago.
We are already seeing the benefits of Dell EqualLogic storage. We have reduced storage management time by approximately 66% and IT personnel have more time to focus on other management tasks.
“The intelligent automation and intuitive operation of the PS Series can literally prevent our team from being here until midnight maintaining servers.” - K. Y. Iyer, head of IT, NDTV
"EqualLogic makes it possible for a one-person IT department to manage a SAN and easily install new servers, while allowing me more time to do other tasks. Because we are a 24/7 news media operation, the intelligent automation and intuitive operation of the PS Series SAN literally prevents me from being here until midnight maintaining servers." - John Mehrtens, IT Director, NECN
“EqualLogic’s approach completely matched our requirements: all the management functionality that we needed was included within the cost of the array, and there was no additional expenditure to bear in the future.” - Steve Clark, Senior Server Support Assistant
"What caught my attention first was that all the features we needed – snapshots, back-up/recovery, remote replication – were built into the product. We got the functionality we wanted and still kept within our budget." - Greg Marrow, CIO, North Carolina Central University
“We have consolidated our servers in our data center by 70 percent. Using virtualization, we can deliver the same performance and capabilities of six phyiscal servers through only one server.” — M. Ajmal Farooq, system administrator, NUST-SEECS
“Having a failover solution will give us a lot of assurance as we grow and add customers. It’s an important step for the future, and we trust the Dell EqualLogic iSCSI solution and our production Dell blades to do the job.” - Ivan Darius, founder and co-CEO, Optimal Blue
"For us, the Dell EqualLogic PS Series offers the best features, reliability, and ease of use, and it provides compatibility with our Apple Macintosh environment, which was a requirement for us.” - Ira Ham, Director of Network and Information Security, Pacific Sunwear of California, Inc.
"The PS Series array is so easy to use. We have plenty of file storage, our key applications are fully protected, and our data is available whenever it is needed – even in Europe and Japan. And, we didn't need any special expertise to make this work." - Tammy Barrett, Network Engineer, Patagonia Inc.
"Storage management time has been cut by approximately 50% with our Dell EqualLogic SAN." - Carl Pywell, IT Manager, Paul Rooney Partnership
"The Dell EqualLogic SAN will provide the costeffective scalability we need to preserve that data plus the flexibility to connect easily with multiple devices beyond the data center. The ease of use and price/ performance ratio made choosing iSCSI an easy decision."
"The EqualLogic PS arrays work beautifully with our virtualization software, allowing us to respond to a server failure in minutes with the click of a mouse. We wanted to build a dynamic data center infrastructure, and that required an unusually flexible and resilient storage system." - Phillip Skeete, IT Director, Plains Exploration & Production Company
"The Dell EqualLogic virtualized storage solution has improved our productivity by around 80 per cent. This compensates for our increasing workloads, and allows the business to grow without expanding the IT team." - Francesco Camisa, Deputy General Managing Director, Policlinico San Marco
"The more access we got to Dell EqualLogic technology, the more it seemed to be the right choice for Preston College. It included all the management software we needed for a single price." - John Greenwood, Head of Technical Services, Preston College
“The best part of this solution is that it is future proof. In order to meet demand, we simply add on another EqualLogic array, and this process just takes minutes.” - Arsyad Junaiddin, IT manager, Areva T&D
"Currently, we're well over 75 percent virtualized," "EqualLogic works so well in our VMware environment that we started to use it for other workloads. Today email is the most important application that our attorneys use, and our Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 implementation is virtualized across the board, and all the data is stored on a Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV SAN." - Rich Raether, Manager, Network Enginering, Quarles & Brady
“We believe Dell EqualLogic is the best option for storing and recovering business data. With the EqualLogic system’s more advanced backup techniques we don’t have any downtime anymore.” - Zeki Kubilay Akyol, chief executive officer, Radore Hosting
“We have consolidated our server environment by around 50 per cent and now plan to virtualize more servers. With the enhanced memory of the Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server, we gain excellent VMware ESXi 4.1 performance.” — Metin Erkamoglu, Information Technology Co-ordinator, Rasen
"Thanks, in part, to the EqualLogic arrays, we are now able to achieve an uptime percentage of 99.999 or higher. Added to which, these arrays provide us with the flexibility to cater for developments in the rapidly changing building renovation and redevelopment market quickly." - Louis Reusken, Information Manager, Rentree
“We found that with Dell solutions and technical support we could successfully virtualize our servers and storage. We also gained the stability, performance, and technical support to maximize the value of our investment.” - Arthur Wang, IT specialist, ReSource Pro
“We have updated that sales model for the digital age by providing agents with powerful online tools. The Dell EqualLogic SAN gives us the performance and flexibility to keep up with the demands of our online tools and ultimately help agents to increase their sales.” - Michael Leather, network services manager, Safeway Insurance
"We pushed the EqualLogic array as hard as possible, but we simply couldn’t max it out. Although our server CPU was red-lining, the EqualLogic array simply kept on going with extremely high levels of performance." - Marcel Dumont, Director of Operations, Schoolbank.nl
"EqualLogic’s reliability has been excellent; since deployment of the PS arrays, we have experienced zero downtime for the SAN. The EqualLogic PS Series SAN scales very easily and is extremely simple and inexpensive to manage. We have already reaped significant cost-of-ownership benefits from the implementation..." - Bo Christiansen, IT Consultant, SDC Udvikling A/S
“It was clear to us that, by choosing Dell, we would not only partner with a global provider of high-quality IT solutions, but benefit from a full range of services designed for OEMs.” - Jens Schneider, Technical Manager, Sekotec
"We are extremely pleased with the Dell EqualLogic hardware—it just works. That reliability is particularly important in meeting our clients’ regulatory compliance needs." - Lara Baker, chief technology officer, Sequestered Solutions Alaska, LLC
“The Dell EqualLogic SAN was very simple to deploy. Our technicians completed the installation and commissioning within 30 minutes.”
"The central piece of our infrastructure is the EqualLogic SAN with its advanced storage management and data protection features. Everything revolves around it." - Steve Meckling, Network Services Administrator, Shiloh
“We used to keep spare servers and hardware components in-house, just in case we needed to replace a server for a customer quickly,” says Stein. “Now that Dell handles all of the support, we don’t need to keep those spares ready. Instead of managing inventory, we can spend our time focusing on more strategic projects.” - Michael Fountain, manager, Finance and Business Administration, Siemens Industry
Dell EqualLogic storage is the key component in our DR strategy. We didn’t have replication capabilities before, and would have had to restore from tape. We now have the ability to recover single documents within an hour. - Eran Gourarie, Director of Technology, Snohomish School District 201
“The Dell EqualLogic solution has made a huge difference in enabling our cloud business model with a scalable storage platform that benefits our bottom line and improves the services we’re able to offer our customers.” Samuel Fleitman, Chief Operating Officer, SoftLayer Technologies, Inc.
"Now that we have Dell servers running Citrix XenServer, we can roll out a virtual server in around four hours, instead of four weeks." - Günther J. Kütting, Head of DP, Steinway & Sons
"We realised that with this technology in place, we could meet our growing data storage needs and achieve our goal of enterprise efficiency. The demonstration by Deverill highlighted just how easy a Dell EqualLogic SAN is to manage." - Gary Holder, Information and Communication Technology Manager, Stoke Damerel Community College
"At the beginning of the process, Dell identified the problems we were facing and recommended the best solutions for our requirements. They provided efficient customer support throughout the project, which helped us to deploy the solution as quickly as possible." - Seo Jong Hwan, IT system manager, Sungkyunkwan University
“Dell got us in the door because they engaged us on the recommendation of VMware for our virtualization expertise. We’re a VMware Premier Partner, which is VMware’s highest level for channel partners. At first, the customer just wanted to virtualize and consolidate legacy servers. Through our partnership with Dell, we conducted joint meetings with the customer to assess their requirements. In doing so, we identified several additional business opportunities—and we won that business. "
"We found that the Dell EqualLogic SAN, integrated tightly with VMware virtualization software, simplified the management of our infrastructure. The Dell and VMware solution offer the best performance in terms of speed and efficiency." - Lin Jahau, IT team leader, Taipei Municipal San Min Elementary School, Taiwan
"We preferred EqualLogic above all the other solutions because of the ease of management it offers. EqualLogic gives Talant the freedom to customise things as our organisation evolves, without having to call in the assistance of third parties. So nobody is invoicing us for the hours they put in." - Geert Huiting, Automation Manager, Talant
"The bottom line is that EqualLogic’s technology has helped me to manage disk space more effectively, build instant recoverability, and prevent downtime – all of which deliver better patient care for the people of central West Virginia." - Mark Boggs, IT Director, Thomas Memorial Hospital
“EqualLogic offers a great affordable SAN as an alternative to server and disk management – without requiring you to invest a lot of time, training, and money getting your technical team up to speed for the installation and use of the SAN.” - Don Combs, Manager, Unitary and Applied Systems
“EqualLogic’s native replication capabilities let me keep a 15-minute replica of our data sitting 100 miles awaya from my office — I think that’s pretty impressive.” - Mark Brophy, Network Administrator, Turner Padget Graham & Laney, P.A.
"We wanted a professional storage system that can offer us many possibilities for expansion and scaling in the future. We have had consistently positive experiences with the EqualLogic iSCSI storage systems, and we are already planning the next expansion steps." - Björn Metzdorf, Director of Information Technology, Turtle Entertainment
“ The Dell solutions help us improve our service infrastructure, as well as the data transmission speed through the network.” Juan Carlos López Villatoro, Director of Advanced Technologies Center, Universidad Francisco Marroquín
"The Dell solutions help us improve our service infrastructure, as well as the data transmission speed through the network. They also enable us to lower our operating costs through better uptime and to maintain a high technological standard by using the most recent technologies such as On-Demand Desktop Streaming, EqualLogic storage, and cutting-edge servers, switches, desktops and laptops." - Juan Carlos López Villatoro, Director of Advanced Technologies Center, Universidad
"The EqualLogic product feature set and performance is unmatched in my opinion. EqualLogic’s snapshot, replication and extended feature set solved other problems we had not even begun to look at. EqualLogic and Mercury Solutions definitely helped us identify and implement best practices for IT management for our disaster recovery policies." - Jeff McDole, IT Manager, University of Michigan Department of Public Safety
“We don’t have to worry about availability anymore. And since our Exchange environment is not as large as it used to be, I have more time for other projects. I’m saving between 400 and 600 hours a year on maintenance of the student and alumni email system.” - Veronica Garza, Network Administrator, University of the Incarnate Word
"We’ve been looking for a solution that offered all the features of a tier-one data center but without the administrative overhead – and we found it with EqualLogic’s PS Series arrays." - Dr. Dilling, Head of the ZDV server and storage division
We determined that Dell EqualLogic was the right SAN platform to recommend to our customers because we think it’s the best value out there. Compared to other SAN solutions, you get the most complete feature set for the money.
"It was clear from the outset that we would be opting for an iSCSI SAN by EqualLogic. A Fibre Channel SAN was out of the question because, from an investment and implementation point of view, that method was much more expensive than an iSCSI SAN. We chose the EqualLogic solution, which is up to 20 percent less expensive and includes more functionality than solutions from competitors such as NetApp and Compellent." - Eddy Schulpé, Adjunct Informatics Manager, VMW
"The built-in, easy-to-use, browser-based management was a big selling feature, and the scalability. The others [test solutions] scale, too, but EqualLogic’s array adds new GigE interfaces along with each storage shell, so you add bandwidth when you grow. None of the others do that, nor do they provide the fail-proof redundancy of the PS Series." - Jim Bollinger, System & Network Engineer, Washington and Lee University
"The EqualLogic arrays have been very reliable, and have demonstrated the ability to move data at a much higher rate than any other solution we tried. In addition, the Customers Service and support have been first rate." - Barry Weinman, Owner, Weinman Geoscience
"Dell EqualLogic helps lower our total cost of ownership, because it means we avoid buying more storage than we need at any one time.” - Peter Gosteli, Head of IT, WIA Wohnen im Alter AG
“For projects like virtual desktops and the SAP test drives which copy a single golden image, the EqualLogic thin clone technology is powerful. It provides 30 times faster cloning capability without requiring extra disk space for anything but incremental changes to the clones. The Xcopy API functionality is a huge benefit when we need to clone one-off virtual machines to bring up additional environments for customers. "
“The EqualLogic SANs are naturally balanced for performance because each chassis has controllers, NICs and spindles matched perfectly. As you add more SANs, you can virtualize the load to maintain peak performance, so EqualLogic enables an organization to grow without needing deep SAN expertise in-house.” - Richard Charlesworth, Director of IT, YES Prep Public Schools
"For less than half the price of our Fibre Channel SAN, the PS Series array provided the capacity and ease-of-management we need to support our growth. We expect it to reduce our total cost-of-ownership by more than $100,000 over the next three years." - Shawn Eveleigh, Senior Systems Administrator, Zenon Environmental
"EqualLogic's cost-effective, plug-and-play storage solution met our scalability and cost requirements, and continues to protect our mission critical operations as we multiply in size." - Dean Patterson, Vice President of IT, ZOOTS
A key goal of this study is to gauge the current level of interest in unified fabric (UF) and associated products, including iSCSI storage, which is a key enabling technology for unified fabric and SAN/LAN convergence.
EqualLogic, Inc. commissioned VeriTest, a service of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., to perform a series of usability and performance tests utilizing the latest iSCSI SAN SAS 15K RPM storage from EqualLogic, the PS3800XV storage arrays. These tests measure the user experience for day-to-day operations involving storage provisioning and operations...
With a focus on scalability, automated management using rich software tools, all-inclusive pricing, and an architecture that leverages the economic advantages of Ethernet and industry standard technologies, Dell‟s EqualLogic storage family is an excellent example of a solution that was purpose-built to address these issues.
The Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS with automated storage tiering leverages fast SAS or faster SSD storage depending on workload
ESG believes that iSCSI is a viable alternative to FC SANs and is attractive to customers because it is less costly and complex. EqualLogic® has emerged as a leader in the iSCSI storage system arena with over 1,000 customers and growing.
Emerging companies continued to drive innovation, while established companies refreshed their offerings and revamped distribution channels to reduce cost and gain share. Changes in market shares highlight the importance of nonproduct selection criteria when choosing storage vendors.
Gartner rates the emerging Internet Small Computer System Interface storage area network market as improved enough to move from our 2006 rating of “Promising” to “Positive” overall, and rates the vendors that have been in this market for at least one year.
The new PS6000 family of IP SAN appliances clearly deliver on Dell’s performance promises but offer a lot more besides. Support for virtualised environments is a high priority and the fact that snapshots, thin provisioning and replication are included makes this a great value appliance.
Dell’s new EqualLogic PS6510X delivers full 10-Gigabit speeds, heaps of storage and extreme ease of use. In this exclusive review we find out if this is the IP SAN appliance enterprises have been waiting for.
In November 2005, Forrester conducted a survey of 50 storage and business continuity decision-makers at North American enterprises to assess adoption trends in storage and business continuity technology...
This IDC Flash summarizes EqualLogic’s business and evaluates its recently announced PS300E, the company’s next-generation storage product, with respect to its positioning within the marketplace.
3/25/2009
Dell EqualLogic PS6000 Storage Arrays, Enhanced Software Suite Provide Customers Increased Performance and Value
11/14/2008
Dell in Leaders Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Storage
9/10/2008
Dell Triples EqualLogic Storage Scalability, Enhances Data Protection For Virtual Infrastructures
9/10/2008
Dell Simplifies Virtualization with Breakthrough Performance, Centralized Management and Ready to Deploy Services
7/10/2008
Dell Number One In iSCSI SANs Worldwide
6/27/2008
Dell Number One in Open Systems Storage Worldwide
6/26/2008
The Wharton School Simplifies New Data Center With Dell
6/23/2008
Virtualization Helps Stoneridge Reduce Data Center Costs
5/12/2008
Dell and VMware Simplify Disaster Recovery
2/4/2008
New Dell EqualLogic Solutions Simplify Storage
1/28/2008
Dell Completes EqualLogic Acquisition
1/14/2008
EqualLogic Wins InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year Award for "Best iSCSI SAN"
Dell’s EqualLogic PS6010XVS iSCSI SAN, the newest member of the PS Series, offers “high-performance solid-state drives, dynamic storage tiering and tighter integration with VMware”.
“Dell EqualLogic SANs subscribe to the concept of ‘Do one thing and do it well,’ and boy, do they do it well… just blazing fast iSCSI performance and a hugely scalable design...” - Paul Venezia, InfoWorld
The Dell EqualLogic PS Series was the standout product in this category. It has been designed to simplify the deployment and administration of consolidated storage. One of the key aspects of the product is its ability to deliver rapid SAN deployment combined with easy-to-use management software.
In the 2009 edition of Storage magazine’s Quality Awards for midrange arrays, Dell has fashioned a dramatic reversal and leaped to the top of the field based on user surveys that for the first time combined Dell’s and EqualLogic’s products.
Nemertes provides the quantitative results of the most in-depth research project ever conducted in the areas of virtualization and data-center technology.
The EqualLogic PS3800XV bested products from two other finalists, including Network Appliance, for this prestigious award in the UK.
EqualLogic PS3800XV storage array takes top prize in Enterprise Storage Hardware Category
EqualLogic was voted Virtualization Product of the Year for the PS3900XV by industry professionals and readers of Storage magazine, the UK’s number one magazine dedicated to storage.
Founder and Vice President of Products and Strategy Paula Long is honored as one of the 2007 Women to Watch
The EqualLogic PS3800XV storage array receives an “Excellent” rating in InfoWorld technical product review
EqualLogic Midrange Storage Arrays Take Top Honors in Quality Award from Storage Magazine and Diogenes Labs
CRN names EqualLogic to its Emerging Tech list of innovative vendors
EqualLogic wins Software Association of New Hampshire’s 2006 MVP Award
Byte and Switch, the premier online storage networking publication, today named the winners in its first annual Big Bytes Awards competition.
EqualLogic wins title of Fastest Growing Private Company in New Hampshire in 2005, according to Business NH Magazine
EqualLogic’s PS300E storage array wins Product Excellence Award 2006.
VARBusiness names EqualLogic’s PS300E Storage Array as a Best Midmarket Product in the Storage category
EqualLogic’s PS300E storage array has won the SAN Product of the Year Award at the UK Storage Awards
After experiencing a hurricane’s aftermath, law firm Quarles & Brady made Dell EqualLogic storage arrays a bulwark against future disaster — at the same time boosting productivity and performance.
A scale-out storage architecture helps organizations deal with demands for growing data capacity and access. Dell engineers put Dell EqualLogic scale-out storage through its paces to demonstrate its scalability in both file and block I/O scenarios.
Smart Copy capabilities included with Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI arrays extend traditional data protection for essential application data stored in Microsoft SQL Server databases by delivering rapid, efficient data protection and recovery.
To ease the management of large data volumes, the Dell E-mail and File Archive solution with CommVault Simpana software includes three reference architectures that provide basic archiving, content indexing, and high-availability capabilities.
On the crest of the data deluge, the Dell Fluid Data vision for an intelligent storage infrastructure enables unparalleled insights and efficiency by delivering the right data to the right place at the right time — for the right cost.
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) helps simplify user data management and enables device- and location-independent data access. Dell EqualLogic systems provide unified, high-performance VDI storage that helps boost IT flexibility.
For effective e-discovery, information retention systems must avoid accidental record loss and enable rapid data recovery — capabilities delivered through the Dell E-mail and File Archive solution with Symantec Enterprise Vault software.
Freeing IT staff from manual storage management tasks enhances productivity and efficiency. Windows PowerShell scripting within Dell EqualLogic storage offers accelerated, automated deployment of advanced features in complex Microsoft® environments.
The proliferation of Microsoft Windows–based application servers calls for an agile storage environment throughout the enterprise. Dell EqualLogic unified, virtualized storage eases data management while enhancing availability.
Rapid data growth advanced by business-critical applications requires tools capable of efficiently managing and protecting data. Enhanced features in Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools and EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters software are up to the task.
Automated data tiering at the sub-volume level helps enterprises boost application performance, enhance cost-efficiency, and streamline storage management. Learn how Dell EqualLogic PS Series firmware version 5.1 optimizes data center resources.
The tight integration of Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series virtualized iSCSI SANs and VMware® vSphere™ virtualization software helps organizations enhance IT efficiency, expand virtualization throughout the IT infrastructure, and set the stage for cloud computing.
The Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS series arrays with VMware View software offer significant opportunities for virtual desktop performance and capacity optimization. The potential benefits of deploying EqualLogic PS6000XVS arrays with VMware View 4.5 include reducing VDI deployment costs, enhanced VDI performance by placing readsensitive base images on low-latency SSDs, and easier VDI deployment through automated and intelligent on-board tiering software.
Dell EqualLogic PS Series virtualized iSCSI SANs offer a robust storage infrastructure and tools designed to simplify storage management and improve scalability and performance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms.
Integrating EqualLogic PS Series SANs with Microsoft Windows operating systems and Exchange Server 2010 helps reduce deployment time and risk. This approach helps organizations maximize Exchange Server 2010 functionality by reducing capital and operational expenses, meeting Exchange SLAs, and successfully leveraging sharedresource architectures.
To help simplify management of diverse endpoint devices and reduce costs, Dell and VMware built, tested, and validated an end-to-end virtual desktop reference architecture designed to optimize VMware View desktop virtualization on Dell hardware.
By helping increase the efficiency of data processing operations, including application access to high-demand data, Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and EqualLogic PS6010XVS iSCSI SAN arrays can support growing data requirements without a corresponding increase in cost and complexity. And by incorporating intelligent data tiering, automated management, and other features, these arrays provide a high-performance, cost-effective way to meet the needs of today’s critical multitiered workloads.
Tiering in a Dell EqualLogic PS Series SAN helps organizations boost resource utilization and enhance service levels by deploying storage on the most cost-effective tiers based on performance,accessibility, and criticality requirements.
Following key best practices can help organizations create scalable, high-performance decision support systems or data warehousing solutions based on the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database platform and Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage arrays.
Dell EqualLogic arrays offer built-in intelligence to help simplify configuration—but operators may still miss important settings. Together, Arista and Dell have created a storage architecture that can automate configuration through switches running the Arista Extensible Operating System (EOS) platform.
Dell's EqualLogic PS6010XV 10G iSCSI array delivers big time performance, offering an easier and lower cost option to Fibre Channel
Consolidating Microsoft Windows file shares into a common pool of network-accessible resources helps increase utilization, simplify management, and enhance service levels. Organizations can deploy scalable Dell PowerVault NX3000 Series network attached storage (NAS) appliances as stand-alone file servers or as gateways to storage area networks to enable reliable, efficient, high-performing Windows file share and application consolidation.
Enterprises are poised for exploring alternatives to traditional desktop computing models. Integrating Citrix XenDesktop 4 desktop virtualization software within the Dell Flexible Computing framework is a cost-efficient way to enhance security, streamline management, and boost user productivity, while providing the flexibility to support a comprehensive array of business requirements.
Dell has created three architecture models for configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 messaging environments. These best-practice models combine the performance and efficiency enhancements of 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge servers and leading-edge Dell storage platforms with the productivity and manageability gains enabled by Exchange Server 2010—allowing enterprises to design cost-effective messaging platforms to meet their specific needs.
Internet SCSI (iSCSI) connectivity is a compelling option for enterprises building virtualized IT environments. By selecting Intel Ethernet server adapters with Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage area networks, organizations can achieve enterprise-class application performance while benefiting from the cost- and labor-saving advantages of iSCSI connectivity.
A storage consolidation strategy based on Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays helps organizations to streamline data management and ensure reliable data protection and recovery. The powerful deduplication, compression, and network optimization technologies available with Dell PowerVault DL2100 backup appliances and Blue Coat ProxySG WAN Optimization appliances help organizations overcome WAN bandwidth limitations to enhance data protection and application recovery.
By combining VMware vSphere 4 with 11thgeneration Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs, organizations can gain the confidence they need to virtualize mission-critical Microsoft applications. vSphere 4 virtualization allows organizations to take advantage of the performance capabilities of 11th-generation PowerEdge servers and continue to deliver outstanding performance for these applications after they have been migrated to the virtualized environment.
Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs provide virtualized storage designed to help organizations fulfill the goal of simplifying their IT infrastructures. The Citrix Essentials suite helps complement and extend the efficiencies and automation provided by EqualLogic storage by offering tools designed to enhance the functionality of the complimentary Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors.
A combination of easy-to-use, automated storage at remote sites and the visibility to manage the entire architecture from a central site helps take the burden off part-time IT staff members at remote or branch offices, who are frequently dualtasked with other functions. Implementing best practices at remote or branch office sites using Dell and partner solutions can help cost-effectively ensure data protection, regulatory compliance, and security at these sites even as the organization grows.
Before iSCSI storage arrays such as the Dell EqualLogic PS Series were widely available, SAN storage typically ran over a separate Fibre Channel network. iSCSI has enabled the deployment of simplified, cost-effective SANs that utilize the same Ethernet-based networks as other data, further increasing the need for a highbandwidth infrastructure.
Organizations can use the architecture described in this article as a blueprint for designing and sizing their own virtualized Exchange Server 2007 messaging infrastructures. These best practices can be used in combination with server, storage, and network sizing tools to help identify performance and capacity requirements, and organizations can further customize the design to help meet specific performance and availability needs while reaping the efficiency and cost benefits of virtualization
To help simplify enterprise desktop management, Dell and VMware have created a flexible, highly scalable desktop virtualization reference architecture based on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays, and powerful new VMware® View 4 technology.
For SMBs and ROBOs within large enterprises, minimizing costs and complexity is critical. Dell EqualLogic PS4000 iSCSI SAN arrays offer powerful enterprise-class features and high levels of reliability, performance, scalability, and data protection in a simple, capable, cost-effective storage array.
For enterprises in a broad range of fields, virtualization has become a popular IT strategy for increasing hardware utilization, enhancing flexibility, and decreasing costs. But while virtualization can offer these and other benefits, running multiple applications on each physical server can place application availability at risk: if a physical server fails, virtualized applications running on that server could become unavailable.
The next generation of virtualization solutions goes beyond just servers to include virtualized storage, networking, and I/O. When IT managers combine VMware vSphere software, 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge servers with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, and advanced Dell EqualLogic storage arrays, they can create the ultimate in powerful, flexible computing models: an internal cloud.
A comprehensive virtualization strategy encompassing virtual servers and consolidated storage enables unprecedented gains in overall data center efficiency and flexibility. VMware® Infrastructure utilizes advanced integration available in Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays to further enhance the virtualized IT infrastructure and help simplify the management of complex data center environments.
To help address the challenges of enterprise desktop management, VMware and Dell have created a scalable VMware® View reference design based on VMware Infrastructure 3, Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, and Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series storage arrays—extending the benefits of virtualization to end-user systems while enhancing administrator control and helping reduce ongoing operational costs.
Because of their complexity and lack of standardization, traditional disaster recovery infrastructures often fail to meet enterprise requirements for recovery speed and integrity at a reasonable cost. By deploying VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager on Dell™ server and storage clusters, organizations can implement a simplified, cost-effective disaster recovery solution.
An enterprise-class storage infrastructure is essential for organizations transitioning to a virtualized data center. Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays enable advanced integration with the robust server virtualization offered by the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization platform—offering the storage foundation for a comprehensive virtualization solution.
Dell's midrange arrays soar from last to first in our user service and reliability survey.
The Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008 highperformance computing (HPC) platform is designed to simplify the deployment, configuration, and management of HPC clusters while also integrating multiple performance enhancements. Running this platform on clusters of Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers can provide a highly available, high-performance foundation for HPC applications.
Protecting and restoring virtual machines (VMs) can be slow and inefficient, and can take precious server resources away from critical applications. Dell™ EqualLogic™ Auto- Snapshot Manager / VMware Edition enables administrators to quickly and easily create hypervisor-aware snapshots of VMs—helping simplify data management, enhance scalability of data protection and recovery, and increase application performance.
In virtualized environments, high availability can be critical to avoiding lost revenue, maintaining productivity, and protecting data from system failure. Combining Microsoft® Hyper-V™ technology with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 on Dell™ platforms can help organizations create highly available virtualized systems while offering simplified management, dynamic performance, workload optimization, and reduced costs.
This article explores the basics of the Hyper-V architecture, discusses available management tools and their use, and outlines key considerations and best practices that can help administrators successfully plan and implement Hyper-V virtualization deployments on Dell servers and storage.
Virtualization can offer increased scalability, reliability, and availability while helping simplify management and reduce operating costs. Now, Virtual Remote Desktop solutions based on VMware® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and virtualized Dell™ EqualLogic™ Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area networks (SANs) can offer similar benefits for the desktop environment—helping reduce the traditional cost and complexity of managing physical laptops, desktops, and workstations.
As server virtualization continues to transform the data center, enterprises have some critical decisions to make. How will they migrate to a fully virtualized environment? How should the IT infrastructure be configured for maximum business benefit? Dell is partnering with other industry leaders to build a flexible, industry-standard approach that helps simplify the transition.
Virtualized IT infrastructures can simplify management and facilitate business continuity while helping minimize power consumption and procurement costs. Virtualization also helps organizations automate disaster recovery plans. Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series arrays and VMware® Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software provide integrated, cost-effective, automated site recovery and testing for enterprise data centers.
Creating application-consistent point-in-time data snapshots at the storage area network level can work well in traditional environments, but can also be a complex, manual process. Dell EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager allows IT administrators to quickly and easily create and restore snapshots, clones, and replicas at the application level—helping simplify data management, reduce business disruption, and improve data integrity.
Cluster environments enable multiple systems to provide higher availability for applications and services than a single system can typically provide. The Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 OS introduces multiple enhancements designed to increase the availability, scalability, and manageability of failover clusters.
Built on a patented peer storage architecture, the EqualLogic® PS Series of Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage arrays offers high performance, reliability, intelligent automation, and seamless virtualization of a single pool of storage to enable simplified enterprise storage deployment, ease of management, and comprehensive data protection.
The advent of Internet SCSI (iSCSI) technology, combined with the latest in server virtualization software, can offer enhanced capabilities and benefits to enterprises of all sizes. This article provides guidance on building a virtualized infrastructure with EqualLogic® PS Series iSCSI storage arrays and VMware® virtualization software.
EqualLogic’s PS3800XV iSCSI array represents the highly evolved state of iSCSI SAN arrays with panache. Fully featured and blazingly fast, this SAS-based array will easily find a home in infrastructures of any size, although the cost will keep it out of smaller shops. For infrastructures that don’t need 2Gb or 4Gb Fibre Channel, and most don’t, iSCSI is the way to go, and EqualLogic is showing us all how it’s done.
PS3800XV is simple to configure, blazing fast, and manages dissimilar arrays with ease
In its first year in our survey, EqualLogic PS Series proved its mettle by unseating Sun FlexLine as the highest rated midrange storage array.
The faster storage processors and Serial Attached SCSI disks of EqualLogic’s new PS3000 series of iSCSI arrays provide the performance needed to support transactional applications such as busy databases with steep IO requirements.
Desperate for a suitable solution, NCCU decided to bring in a solutions integrator to assess its needs. NCCU turned to VeriStor Systems, a systems integrator that specializes in enterprise data storage solutions. After working with NCCU to identify its primary challenges, VeriStor determined that an iSCSI SAN (storage area network) from EqualLogic was the most efficient and cost-effective means for meeting the university’s unique storage challenges.
NCCU was using direct-attached storage on its servers and wanted to create a SAN. VeriStor brought in an iSCSI solution, giving the university a scalable storage solution at a lower cost than Fibre Channel solutions.
How can a nonprofit healtcare organization afford mission-critical disaster recovery? For LifeLink Foundation, the answer was iSCSI.
Alan Hunt tackles what most IT directors do, including major rollouts, all his company’s desktop systems, server systems and networks. Recently, though, as the manager of operations for Dickinson Wright, a Detroit-based law firm with some 220 attorneys and more than 425 employees across six offices, he has been tasked with relocating his company’s data center from downtown Detroit.
Just as iSCSI has made enterprise- class SANs and storage management accessible to everyone, it has also made the enterprise storage grid a reality for small and medium-size businesses as well as for large enterprises.
As the technology has matured, IP-based storage arrays have established a beachhead as the preferred low-end SAN option.
The consolidation and virtualization of storage lays the foundation for unprecedented flexibility of a new, more dynamic data center.
iSCSI is succeeding because customers are asking for it—not only for secondary storage, for which certain products are specifically designed, but primarily as a robust, lower cost, simpler-to-manage alternative to Fibre Channel.
Today’s operating systems, applications and storage arrays are integrating more and more snapshot coordination capabilities, simplifying the deployment and management of snapshots with backup and recovery.
EqualLogic Inc.’s PeerStorage array 100E is a versatile iSCSI-based storage system that can grow to meet the storage needs of small and midsize IT organizations.
Companies have a growing number of options available for managing their SAN and NAS systems. Among them: high-end storage tools at new, low-end prices.

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As part of it's ongoing R&D effort, Dell introduced the EqualLogic PS6100 and PS4100 iSCSI storage offerings, built on its Dell Fluid Data architecture, to meet future data management. The architecture is designed to help users address data management challenges associated with data center virtualization and data growth, and facilitate the movement of data from the server to storage to the cloud.
The Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVS with automated storage tiering leverages fast SAS or faster SSD storage depending on workload
Dell’s new EqualLogic PS6510X iSCSI SAN delivers full 10-Gigabit speeds, heaps of storage and extreme ease of use. In this exclusive review we find out if this is the IP SAN appliance enterprises have been waiting for.
Dell's EqualLogic PS6010XV 10G iSCSI SAN array delivers big time performance, offering an easier and lower cost option to Fibre Channel.
The PS4000E is easy to deploy and is good value, including snapshots, thin provisioning and replication in the price. Add in top performance and expansion potential, and it's one classy IP SAN appliance.
The new PS6000 family of IP SAN appliances clearly deliver on Dell’s performance promises but offer a lot more besides. Support for virtualised environments is a high priority and the fact that snapshots, thin provisioning and replication are included makes this a great value appliance.
At the cutting edge of storage, virtualization promises to help businesses archive data with unprecedented efficiency. The Northeast Bank is relying on Dell’s EqualLogic PS5000 Series virtualized storage-area network to store corporate data, optimize existing storage and meet the company’s changing storage needs.
As new competition emerges from Cisco Systems’ new virtualized first blade servers, Dell announces enhancements to its EqualLogic line aimed at easing consolidation of storage, servers and network services into one architecture that’s further optimized to allow for virtualization.