Mar 02

Dell Strategic Focus in a New Era

Posted in: EqualLogic, General IT

A few notes from Praveen Asthana’s Keynote…

Dell is focused on Open, Capable, and Affordable solutions.  Many vendors try to do one or two of these, but very few if any are able to do all three.  In the 2010s Dell hopes to lead in the Virtual Era.  Dell wants to have a holistic approach that creates efficiency across the spectrum of devices (from handhelds to clients), be open, and create a world class customer-tailored solution… meaning specialized sales people who have deep knowledge of products.  Also working towards not changing account representatives every six months.  (This is huge in my book!)

EqualLogic is currently up to 14,000 customers.  Dell claims 50& less time to manage, is 50% less expensive, and has a longer than expected useful life greater than 5 years.  EqualLogic is at the heart of Dell’s transformation. 

 Why?
1) Own intellectual property
2) Software is important
3) Great channel partners
4) Virtualization changes everything
5) Continue a holistic solution focus

Dell still remains customer focused.  They want to be a solutions company but not lose focus on the customer.

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Mar 02

EqualLogic User Conference – Day One Recap

Posted in: General IT

Sitting on the train into Dallas this morning for the second day of the EqualLogic conference. An unusual experience for me to be blogging from a train. Actually rather unusual to BE on a train in the first place. Usually my five mile commute by car to the office is just to my liking.
Here are a few thoughts about my experience at the conference kickoff yesterday.
1) Dell has done a great job with making this about the customer. They are obviously here to listen and learn.
2) Dell is passionate about their products. This is huge in my book. They love what they produce and want us to be successful and feel the same way.
3) The ratio of Dell employees to customers at this conference is amazing. They have made a huge investment in the number of people here. Probably 100 customers and 60 Dell employees. Greatness.
4) We are being challenged. Many conferences feel like a waste of time. This one doesn’t. I plan to learn a ton today.

Well, the train is almost to my destination, so time to wrap up this post. More posts later today.

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Mar 01

EqualLogic Conference Day One

Posted in: General IT

Just arrived at the Dell EqualLogic conference here at the W hotel in downtown Dallas. looking forward to almost two full days of learning about how we can better leverage out EqualLogic storage and VMware platforms at Watermark.
First up, we are sitting in the session on best practices for iSCSI networks. Lots of great information on the basics of networking and switching. Then more information on planning for your environment. As with any technology implementation, there are many infrastructure and security implications, which is why it’s great to sit in a room and be forced to think through these things.
For example, are we using switches with large enough buffers? Is flow control turned on? Have we deployed jumbo frames on ALL switches in the chain? Have we scaled our switching correctly?
I’ve got a feeling that after this evening my brain may already be full. Either way, I’m excited to be here and looking forward to the next few days. You can watch the tweets from the conference by following the #eqlconf hashtag.
More updates to come.

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Jan 22

Crashplan Pro + Drobo Pro = Warm Fuzzy Feeling

Posted in: CITRT, General IT, Mac OS X

We have just recently implemented Crashplan Pro as a primary backup strategy for our Mac machines.  We will slowly be rolling this out to all of our Mac users, especially laptop users and potentially PC users as well.  A few things that we love about Crashplan Pro.

  • They have a 25% discount for non-profits.  Just ask them.  I love vendors who do this.
  • Crashplan is easy to use from the server perspective and invisible to the end user.
  • It is very flexible and simple while remaining powerful.  They have really hit the sweet spot on this.  You don’t need a PhD to configure it.
  • Users can back up from anywhere across the internet.  That’s right… anywhere.  Meaning my Macbook Pro is still being backed up even when I have it at home.
  • They offer a 30 day trial.  You can run it, fully featured, for 30 days before making a decision.
  • Multiple backup targets.  My Macbook can back up to my local firewire drive AND the crashplan server.  Ok, so I’m paranoid.

Implementation was easy.  We installed the server product on an older server chassis and connected it first to local storage, which was fine but not really enough for all of our users.  Next we purchased a 16 Terabyte Drobo Pro (8 drives x 2TB).  For less than 3k for 16TB, the Drobo Pro is a great backup storage solution.  It’s iSCSI, which makes it a snap for connecting to the Crashplan server, and while I’m not convinced that I would use a Drobo for primary storage of mission critical data, this is a great product for backup data (video archiving, files, etc).  Besides, I trust EqualLogic to handle my primary storage anyway.  We’ll use this same storage (and server) to also store our Veeam backups of our VMware servers.  Now, I should also mention that we have a great offsite backup solution for our critical data.  I highly recommend you look into One Safe Place if you are looking for offsite storage.  I realize that Crashplan offers offsite, but the SQL and Exchange tools that One Safe Place provides are amazing.  I would never recommend that you only backup data onsite, you should always offsite mission critical data in some fashion, but in this case we are talking about the data that resides on individual laptops, not servers.

Licensing for Crashplan is simple.  Once you have purchased your license, you just enter the license key into the server (one time) and your clients will be licensed.  In our case, we purchased 25 licenses.  One of our hurdles to implementing more Mac computers on our campus was backup.  I should also mention that the Crashplan Pro client works for both the PC and the Mac, so users on both platforms can backup to the same server.  Mac users and PC users can use the same client licensing.

There had been lots of discussion around this solution amongst Church IT guys from around the country.  If you are church or business owner looking for a solid backup solution, you should look at Crashplan Pro.

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Aug 12

Why I Love our EqualLogic SAN

Posted in: EqualLogic, General IT

Last night the IT team at Watermark completed the addition of a new EqualLogic array into our existing SAN solution.  There are many things that I love about EqualLogic, but first and foremost is the simplicity.  Here at Watermark, we really aren’t an IT shop.  We have two full time IT people (myself included) and a part time helpdesk person.  We are currently supporting a ton of users, a large campus, Windows servers, Mac OS, Web Development, VMware ESX, etc.  The last thing I need to worry about is allocating hours of time to support our storage solution.  That’s where EqualLogic has been a huge win for us.

2EQL

We purchased our first EqualLogic array one year ago from VR6 Systems (whom I HIGHLY recommend you talk to if you are looking to purchase).  It is a sixteen drive, 8 Terabyte solution meant to drive the storage for our VMware ESX implementation project.  Since that time, we have moved our Exchange 2007, Sharepoint, File Serving, Print, SQL servers, a domain controller, etc over to VMware with the data stores on the SAN.  We’ve experienced great performance with few issues at all.  A perfect result for a small-to-midsize IT team.

We have also seen our data needs grow tremendously over the past year. We began to look at cloud storage with Amazon S3 and others for some of these growing needs but at the end of the analysis, the amount of time uploading these files, storing them, downloading them again for reuse was going to become more costly over 3 years than looking at new EQL storage solution not even considering the speed benefits of local storage.

Last night we upgraded the firmware on our new array and the existing one to the latest 4.1.4 version.  No major issues on either and it took very little time.  At that point we ran the wizard provided by EqualLogic, which found the new uninitialized array.  A series of maybe 4 questions later and the new array was added to the existing group.  Just… Like… That…  It really is that easy.  Adding the new 16TB of storage to the existing pool and right away, that space was available.  Within minutes, the (now one large) array was moving data over to the new spindles.  Over the next week, it will automatically move the data to the right number of disks to give us the best performance.  We did notice last night that one of the iscsi connections from VMware had also automatically starting using the NICs on the new controller, so once again, we are starting to see the benefit of adding more gigabit connections to our data.

I love that we get to enjoy working with such great technology, especially when doing it for ministry.  It’s a blessing.

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