equallogic

It looks like Dell/Equallogic won the mid-size storage array of the year. I am currently working with a customer to get rid of one. My guess on why it has such a large install base in this industry is the fact that it is the standard of one of the large IT support firms that do support in my industry.

It does work. It can be fairly slow and uses RAID-50. Yes, RAID-50. Each unit itself can only have 14 disks and dual controllers. It is pure iSCSI. If you want to add disk, you add a unit and create a group. The group is basically a multitude of units in which a pool of storage is created. Hosts connect to the group IP and that forwards you to the correct unit to get your data.

It is basically the same thing the big guys are trying to do with storage virtualization. EMC and Netapp have been doing similar stuff on a larger scale. The idea is cool. You pop one of these and add it to the group and it auto-configures its RAID groups, IP info, disks, access, etc. Pretty neat.

It is a slow performer though and that is why we are getting rid of it, on top of the fact that the way it grows vertically is something we dont desire. I do suggest reading a bit about RAID-50 though.