EqualLogic and Zoots Customer Success Story Featuring Expert Server Group

ZOOTS PROVIDES 24/7 DATA AVAILABILITY WITH SCALABLE
EQUALLOGIC SAN – Entire case study available upon request

THE CHALLENGE: UPGRADE STORAGE FOR STEADY AND SIGNIFICANT
COMPANY GROWTH

“EqualLogic’s cost-effective, plug-and-play storage solution met
our scalability and cost requirements, and continues to protect
our mission critical operations as we multiply in size.”
– ZOOTS, Vice President of IT,
Dean Patterson

With its extensive growth, which includes the addition of new
stores, employees, customers, road maps, and all accompanying
data, ZOOTS needed a scalable SAN that would be
easy to use for its present and future employees. The new
SAN had to protect ZOOTS’ mission-critical application, an
all-in-one, custom-built application based on Microsoft SQL
server. Other business applications include Great Plains
Financial, Microsoft Exchange Server, ADP payroll software
and a Pilot Decision financial analysis database.

THE SOLUTION: MIGRATE FROM FIBRE CHANNEL TO
iSCSI TECHNOLOGY

After comparing the Fibre Channel solutions to EqualLogic’s
iSCSI SAN, ZOOTS worked with an EqualLogic reseller to
deploy an EqualLogic PS100E with 3.5 terabytes of raw
capacity as the fundamental storage infrastructure. From the
start, EqualLogic delivered on its promises, and ZOOTS
appreciated that the time EqualLogic said it would take to set
up and run was entirely accurate. The IT department did not
even need to look at manual, and installation required zero
upfront training.

RESELLER RELATIONSHIP

After comparing the Fibre Channel solutions to EqualLogic’s
iSCSI SAN, ZOOTS worked with reseller and EqualLogic
partner Expert Server Group to deploy an EqualLogic PS100E
with 3.5 terabytes of raw capacity as the fundamental
storage infrastructure.

VMware * MS SQL, Customer Facing "Application Brownout" issue is solved in hours – with Akorri BalancePoint

One of my clients with a decent size VM environment (10 ESX hosts, multiple EMC FC arrays) had experienced an “application brownout” for weeks in their VM and physical environments.

Weeks and weeks of trying to fix this didn’t solve the problem, the tools in place (VirtualCenter, and others) didn’t have visibility from the VM down to the spindle nor did it find the I/O bottleneck and money was wasted by purchasing additional hardware.
BalancePoint was installed and they had data coming back within a few hours.
BP’s troubleshooting analysis found the issue , recommended the fix and the problem was solved within the first 48 hours of using this product.

http://www.akorri.com

“What is needed is a new approach to IT management to cope with the new challenges and complexity that server virtualization engenders. Toolsets for discovering and managing separate domains exist, but these traditional tools are inadequate in the interconnected and virtualized infrastructure. The lack of infrastructure-wide visibility and control in mixed physical and virtual environments is becoming a serious problem for IT”

http://infostor.com/display_article/307507/23/ARTCL/none/none/Server-virtualization-drives-cross-domain-management/

Equallogic , Dell & the virtualization bubble ..Dell Pulls an EMC

The red hot virtualization market gets hotter by the day.

Today Dell announced that they were going to buy Nashua, NH based Equallogic (leaders in iSCSI enterprise SANs) for a cool $1.4 billion. This probably means that the LSI OEM partnership will come to a hault and so will Dell’s MD3000i at some point. This deal is interesting at many levels:

a) just 4 years ago, when we picked up Equallogic ; many of the naysayers said that iSCSI wouldnt cut it – it is a toy, slow, poor management, security issues – etc , etc – simply just FUD (fear, uncertainty , and doubt) from people who didnt know better or made $ by selling FC SANs

b) Equallogic got themselves a great price it seems – considering that they were on target for around $100 million in sales this year. They were very close to going public on their own. So Dell in effect is trying to do what EMC did a few years ago , when they snagged VMware before they went public. Back then , that price seemed high too. Equallogic and NetApp are the platforms of choice today for VMware ESX farms.

c) Dell is saying that Equallogic’s partner channel will stay in place. It will be interesting to see if this is the case and how long this lasts. Dell will need the channel for awhile – enterprise iSCSI SANs with lots of competition are not going to sell themselves. Buying a $5000 AX150i is a bit different than what we have here.

d) How will the EMC reps in the field feel about this ? EMC and Dell have a great , symbiotic relationship now – however will the EMC reps still feel comfortable about referring business to Dell as a channel partner when the client might find out about the new Dell storage company – called Equallogic?