churchIT

Congratulations to my wife and me!

Sorry about the minor blog hiatus. The last 3-4 weeks have been killer! I have had major problems with our Main Campus domain controller / DFS server. Then I attended the IT Roundtable, at Sugar Creek Baptist Church, April 16-18. On the way home from the Roundtable, I got a call from my wife, Dawn, that she thought she was going into labor. She was only in early labor but we ended up at the hospital, at 2 AM that night. I kidded my wife that she just had to get past the roundtable. I never thought that she would take me so literally!

Dawn delivered Zachary (Zach) Michael Reichling at 1:58PM, April 19. He weighed 7lbs 4oz and was 19 1/2in.

 

SAN Installed

We received the new EqualLogic PS100E SAN this Monday. We immediately installed it in the rack and powered it up. Physical installation was easy, just like every other piece of equipment in the rack, we did have to reroute some cables though. I had to setup the new Vlan for the SAN and have setup the IPs for all the adapters. The software setup was very easy and I did the setup twice. I tried the Windows Setup application first and then wiped the configuration and setup from the terminal console. To be honest, I liked the console setup better, but I think that is because I use telnet fairly often. Either way, setup is a breeze. I setup the SAN with RAID 50 and there are 2 hot spare drives, so my 3.5TB SAN has a usable capacity of about 2.5TB.

I connected a server to the SAN using one its built-in adapters, but it turns out that the server adapter does not support Jumbo frames and was very slow at file transfers. I will be purchasing new NICs that have TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and Jumbo frame support shortly. I will also take Alacritech up on their offer of trying one of their NICs versus an Intel or HP NIC that has TOE. Has anyone else done performance testing on TOE NICs on their SAN?

I am attaching a couple pictures of the SAN, racked and ready.

SAN Decision

After months of research and a month of talks with vendors and manufacturers, l I have made a decision. Drum roll please…… EqualLogic. Our PO was submitted Friday and we are expecting it to be delivered late this week or early next week.

Like I've stated in past posts, this has been a difficult decision but I feel very confident about it. I have ranked the solutions on order of appeal EqualLogic, LeftHand MPC, LeftHand NSM, D-Link and Siafu. The last week, I was only looking at the EqualLogic and MPC solutions and each has their own merits. EqualLogic could be setup by us and has the best internal redundancy and LeftHand has their Campus SAN solution and thin provisioning. I really liked the LeftHand Campus SAN solution, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn't think it was that big of an advantage, as it looked on paper. Any SAN solution, for the foreseeable future, would be installed the main server room, so physical separation for disaster recovery (DR) is not possible for us, this negated part of their advantage. I'd rather have my DR replicate to an offsite data center and both units support this requirement. To make the LeftHand solution redundant in the Campus SAN, we must synchronously replicate data between two units. This requires a 50% storage overhead on top of the RAID overhead inside the units; this never seemed like a storage efficient solution. Lastly, I was worried about supporting the system. Because it was highly recommended that the manufacturer install the solution and train us, I was very concerned about transferring knowledge in the future or someone else supporting it if I was on the other side of the country. EqualLogic on the other hand has multiple controller boards, fan units, hard drives and power supplies within each unit, so the odds of a single unit going down is minimal, and I am comfortable with that. I also was much more comfortable with the support requirements of the EqualLogic solution, so someone could come it behind me and manage the system.

Now it's time to prepare for the installation!