PS5500E / PS5000E

[admin]

Im looking for some feedback from existing users. We are thinking of implementing the PS series arrays in our environment. It (to start) and they (down the road) would be used for our virtual environment (200+ VM's) as well as storage for our SQL servers and file servers (30tb or so combined). The heavy IO sql servers would likely remain using their current das for the time being. I have some quote requests out and waiting to hear back on the PS5500E from Dell (they are our vendor). I think the 5500e fully populated would be good for us. But am also considering the 5000e as well to get us started.

What I am interested in is the following: How large of an environment are your supporting with the PS sata array's. How many array's/units do you have connected? Are you using them solely for your virtual environment or does it also share as a storage repository for your other large data servers? Do you have SAS units as well as SATA and how well does this work assigning some servers to virtual pools created on the SAS arrays?

We were really considering going with the CX series but from what I have been hearing from a lot of people the PS does just as well excluding the fact that you cannot just add a couple drives as you need them, you instead have to be a new unit either half or fully populated and you cant mix sas and sata within the same shelf. The fibre of the cx really isnt a selling feature for us and the additional cost for every piece of software always keeps the price extremly high. It does however offer considerable granularity and scalabiliy on an as needed basis.

The other concern I have is, if we went with the SATA disks with a raid10 array are we going to see decent enough performance to warrant going with sata vs sas? As I understand the SATA in the PS arrays offers surprisingly good performance. I just need some reassurance from others running larger environments on these arrays.

Thanks

[EQLGuy]

A couple of other things to keep in mind:

PS5500/PS6500 'SUMO' arrays can currently only be in a storage pool with other PS5500/PS6500 arrays, so you won't be able to drop in a smaller PS5000/PS6000 box to up the IOPs in future.

The approach taken by EqualLogic has traditionally been very much 'Buy storage as you need it' , but with the SUMO boxes it's a slightly more long term approach.

Also, the original SUMO could only be deployed at RAID50, but since the latest firmware release and the release of the PS6500E you can use RAID 5, RAID 10 and RAID 6 (obviously only one level per appliance) to create different performance characteristics.

All that said the PS5500 was a great box that performed well, the PS6500 should only improve on that.

[jayctd]

This is a great recomendation.

I would note that the performance difference and the benifits of keeping your spindal count up come into play specially durring "Boot storm"

We used to run the PS5000E's under our ESX platform but we found performance suffered (specially given our scale with roughly 300 teir1 app virtuals) we were best served keeping to the 5000XV series (so keeping spindels up, disk performance up and ratios of disk/network down)

I would shy away from the 5500 except in the case of very very large implementiations where data size is key and performance is only a close second

[jkopp]

Our shop isn't as big as yours, but we are doing many of the things you're asking about.

Anything we can has been virtualize in ESX and is on the Equallogic SAN....domain contollers, Exchange (500 users - relatively low IO), a dozen SQL servers, and almost all of our application servers...a little over 125VMs in all. Most of our non SQL VMs have very little IO once running.

We have two PS3800 units striped together (both RAID50 16 x 400GB 10K-rpm SAS disks). We're planning to continue to use this as our "fast disk" for future high IO needs. I've moved some of our heavy IO LUNS to the "slow" PS5000E during SAN maintenance windows and have never experienced issues.

Our PS5000E (RAID50 16 x 750GB 7.8K-rpm SATA disks) will be going to our DR Site for additional SAN-to-SAN data replication space and will be replaced by a PS6500. Haven't had any issues IO issues with it....just running out of room.

We're in the middle of dropping in a PS6500 (RAID50 48 x 1TB 7.8K-rpm SATA disks). This will house the majority of our future disk growth for the near future. I'm hoping that the combination of 48 spindles and the 4th GB NIC will more than compensate for the 1TB spindle density. We got a great price point on this from Dell.

Knock on wood, we've never experienced a SAN bottleneck. Our heaviest sustained IO is when our VM guests (using the microsoft iSCSI client for MPIO) will each peg 2 GB NICs for hours at a time running SQL database backups of some rather large databases. Dell's "SAN HQ" (automagic SNMP monitoring) says we're doing well as far as IO and latency go...even if I run the nasty backup jobs during our peak hours.

I hope your experience goes as well as ours has so far. Good Luck!