EqualLogic Firms Up Virtualization

EqualLogic is pumping up its virtualization and data management features to try and make its iSCSI SAN systems more enterprise friendly.

While EqualLogic is rolling out a new PS400E system that supports 10.5 TBytes -- its largest capacity array -- its firmware upgrade is likely to be a more valuable addition for users, since it works across the vendor's entire product line.

With the firmware upgrade, EqualLogic's PS IP SAN systems support:

These features aren't exclusive to EqualLogic; most enterprise systems support them. Virtualization engines such as EMC's Invista, Hitachi's TagmaStore, and IBM's SAN Volume Controller (SVC) support them across different vendors' storage, while EqualLogic's only works within its own systems.

It offers EqualLogic the type of virtualization capabilities it needs to compete as an enterprise system, as opposed to a low-end iSCSI SAN. EqualLogic's price advantage -- the new PSE400E has a $66,000 list price for 10.5 Tbytes of SATA disk -- over enterprise systems may sway some users to bypass a few bells and whistles that the big boys offer.Analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO Group says EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks, which are based on clustered software, are the IP SAN startups that can attack the enterprise, where they compete with Fibre Channel and iSCSI systems from EMC, IBM, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Network Appliance, and Sun. (See iSCSI Suppliers Seek Servers and IP SANs Struggle for Respect.)

"With iSCSI, you have those systems that will compete as low-cost iSCSI targets, just a bunch of arrays tied loosely together," Schulz says. "Then you have another class with true enterprise class capabilities such as data protection, scaling up, and so on. EqualLogic and Left Hand are in the upper end of that market."

He points to the support of multi-volume consistency groups as an especially valuable addition to EqualLogic's arsenal. Multi-volume consistency groups allow users to group applications across arrays and replicate them together. Administrators can apply quality-of-service policies to each application.

"That's something that's been exclusive to the high-end enterprise," Schulz says.

Alan Wright, manager of operations for Detroit-based law firm Dickinson Wright, says the new firmware will make it easier to manage his 11 PS200E arrays spread over six offices."The ability to manage at that level is great," he says. "I can use one policy to manage snapshots across volumes, so I can do a whole server as a group or across an application. If I want to use RAID 50, RAID 10, and RAID 5 in one array, I can manage them under one group instead of a different group for each RAID type. I'll gain load balancing too, as well as the ability to move volumes between RAID types automatically."

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch