EqualLogic vs. PowerVault

[wdroush1]

Alright, looking at SAN options.

We have a vendor we're working with, and they're obviously pushing EqualLogic hard. They just released the 4100 series which is a bit nicer, and they're trying to get more competitive with their pricing.

However, Dell also released the MD3600 series PowerVault, which also looks quite tasty, both in price and mostly in it's expandability. Our vendor keeps insisting the EqualLogic is so scalable, but it's datasheet details that the 4000 series can only expand to two boxes, and also it seems the technology requires a lot of inter-talk between the boxes, so basically as usual it's wasted resources assuming I don't know how to provision LUNs.

We were originally looking at EMC's VNXe series and NetApps FAS series models because of their attachable disk enclosures, I wanted to be able to use 10/15K SAS for our database and 7.2 NL-SAS for cheap storage for low-demand business apps (Dev, Testing, low demand OSes, etc.).

Of course our vendor gives us the run around about how a non-virtualized block system is practically useless (I think they just don't want us to go with something they may not be familiar with, even though they're a Dell vendor, they almost lost this sale simply because they weren't even willing to disclose the PowerVault did all that we requested of a SAN), and that managing a LUN is way too much work (complaints that if I misprovision a LUN that I'll have to deal with capacity issues, which... I don't expect an engineer to be telling me "well we're going to set you up incorrectly" basically).

So anyway, the PowerVaults are on ESXi 4.1 and 5.0's HCL, we'll probably be looking at 4.1U1 downgrades being as we'll be running on older blades for this deployment.

So simple enough: Anyone own PowerVaults? How do they stack up? Anyone own both? Is the 8 snapshots per LUN really a problem? Can the PowerVault beat the pants off of the EqualLogic in terms of performance (3200 series has twice the ports, 4x as many in active/active which I was told the EQ could do but then their unit in their rack was NOT)? How about all the VMWare integration that EQ does? Is it worth another 20-25% of cost to our SAN budget? What benefits do I get from a SAN that is Exchange aware (I believe the EQ does)? Is there anything I'm missing here?

We're looking to do replication, I know we lose SAN-to-SAN based replication, but we were probably looking at running Veeam anyway, so that would be fine, right?

Also, I pointed out quite a few times to them that we run NexentaStor right now, and that nothing they throw at us is going to be more confusing to set up and manage than that, actually we're looking to drop to NexentaCore for our backup systems, I'm not scared of having something I have to manage, if anything getting away from such expensive tiering will allow me to buy the equipment to tier.

And they've pushed that it doesn't have RAID-50, which I quesiton that deployment up front, being as however they divy up 22 drives into a RAID 50 (24 - 2 hot spares) means we can get terrible write performance, also it means we have an unmatched RAID-5 size in there which is uh... odd.

[wdroush1]

Looks like our ESXi providers are not going to support anything but an EqualLogic even though they're a full on Dell vendor, so it looks like this thread will be about telling me how we're burning money by going with a vendor that can't support anything that is more complicated that "baby's first SAN". Bleh. :smileysad:

If it was my choice, I probably would have dropped them right there, as a Dell vendor your inability to back any Dell products more complicated than plug-and-play scares me... especially considering how many people fresh into virtualization on these boards I've seen deploy on PowerVaults.

Also no manual tiering on the EQL, so that means my dev network gets to compete with the production.

[golddiggie]

Why not go with an EqualLogic 6000 series setup instead of the 4000/4100 series? I've used the 6000E arrays before with excellent results.

Also, I do hope you're not locked into using a single vendor for these things. I would actually contact Dell directly and tell them that your primary vendor is refusing to sell, and support, products of theirs that you WANT to buy. Let Dell bring down the hand of God on them over it (pretty sure it's a big no-no for the vendors to do that). Get Dell to either force the other wacko's to sell, and fully support, what YOU want to buy, or shift your account to another vendor/reseller that will. You have the right to do so, since it's your company making the purchases. If the reseller is inept, you have the right to shift to another.

I've had manufacturers shift accounts between vendors/resellers before. Sometimes the reseller fights it, but you can escallate the request up the chain until it happens. The last time I did this it was so that we could get a complete solution as WE wanted it. This included multiple manufacturer items (servers and storage from Dell, switches from HP, VMware licenses and Quest software bundles). Getting it all from the same reseller made for much deeper savings (additional programs were leveraged).

[JohnADCO]

That is a shame...    I will say?    Powervaults are not long term solutions.    They do perform well though.    We are 5 years now on MD3000i's and it is looking like no Vsphere 5 support will ever happen.

In evaluating storage systems?  One thing we have learned is that the Powervault stuff runs stout performance wise to most of the highest end SAN manufactures,  much better than some of them even.   Of course you tend to get pretty scaled down units for eval, but still.

Its' a shame because Dell reps have plenty of margine on the Powervaults,  beat your rep up and you would be surprised what the final price can be on them.

[wdroush1]

JohnADCO wrote:

That is a shame...    I will say?    Powervaults are not long term solutions.    They do perform well though.    We are 5 years now on MD3000i's and it is looking like no Vsphere 5 support will ever happen.

In evaluating storage systems?  One thing we have learned is that the Powervault stuff runs stout performance wise to most of the highest end SAN manufactures,  much better than some of them even.   Of course you tend to get pretty scaled down units for eval, but still.

Its' a shame because Dell reps have plenty of margine on the Powervaults,  beat your rep up and you would be surprised what the final price can be on them.

Isn't the MD3000i kinda old? They don't have them around anymore, 3200s and 3600s are on the ESXi 4.1/5.0 HCL... on top of that I've already been told that we're looking at a 5 year lifecycle on our SAN (hence why I want the expandability, not the ability to buy a new SAN 3 years in), the price for a full specced MD3200 (15K SAS) at list price is looking like it is going to beat the EqualLogic price (which we're beating our vendor todeath on to try to get it to a reasonable price).

Dell's benchmarking also put the MD3200 way ahead of the 3000, the 3600 performs about the same (with more ethernet ports though), at around 30k IOPS tops.

The nice part also if when we retire the MD3600, it can become our backup array with cheaper drives (buy a bunch of 2TB drives), the EqualLogic can become a brick.

golddiggie wrote:

Why not go with an EqualLogic 6000 series setup instead of the 4000/4100 series? I've used the 6000E arrays before with excellent results.

Expensive, I already don't like the 4x00 series pricing, we can probably run under the 4100 fine, it's just that whole "if someone comes to me and asks for more, we have to drop a whole new SAN in". Especially with VDI coming in, merging development and testing, and some more tweaks in our system I'm concerned about that whole "we still may have to expand" problem within the next few years.

Our vendor keeps saying "RAID 50" but I keep thinking "write IOPS--", so unless they can give us good benchmarks on write IOPS (they're always quoting theoretical raw disk reads) I'll be running a RAID-10, which means a hard limit of about 7TB on the 10K SAS, minus overhead on the EQL platform, minus snapshots, and if we throw another box in the cluster, minus overhead for that (which I've heard can get high too).

Also, I do hope you're not locked into using a single vendor for these things. I would actually contact Dell directly and tell them that your primary vendor is refusing to sell, and support, products of theirs that you WANT to buy. Let Dell bring down the hand of God on them over it (pretty sure it's a big no-no for the vendors to do that). Get Dell to either force the other wacko's to sell, and fully support, what YOU want to buy, or shift your account to another vendor/reseller that will. You have the right to do so, since it's your company making the purchases. If the reseller is inept, you have the right to shift to another.

They'll sell it to us, but they wont support it in our production environment. They also provide first-call support for the VMWare architecture, so they're kind of interested in how we actually have everything set up. Of course I wonder how VMWare feels about a partner that won't support their software on hardware that is on the HCL.

However, I have the feeling we're locked into this vendor (that choice is above me).

I've had manufacturers shift accounts between vendors/resellers before. Sometimes the reseller fights it, but you can escallate the request up the chain until it happens. The last time I did this it was so that we could get a complete solution as WE wanted it. This included multiple manufacturer items (servers and storage from Dell, switches from HP, VMware licenses and Quest software bundles). Getting it all from the same reseller made for much deeper savings (additional programs were leveraged).

I've thought of going directly to Dell to get a second opinion on PowerVault (they right up don't want to do it), but I figured I wanted to talk to people with PowerVaults in the field before I entertained the idea.

[JohnADCO]

A 5 year life cycle would be a good candidate for the cheaper Powervault storage.

We figure we only have a couple of more years out of our PV's for sure.    We are going a different direction will allow us to keep using them though as long as we want. 

Yep,  the MD3000i is considered old.   Goes to show how specs aren't everything. Performance is good even compared to some heavy hitting modern solutions costing 5 time the price.     Our storage solution evaluations in the past year have been an eye opening experience for sure.

When we purchased out MD3000i's I was totally new to shared storage / iSCSI.    I do some volunteer work for a non-profit and they just got a whale of a deal on their new Powervault san.  Maybe because in the end they were non profit?  I am not sure,  I got the rep down almost 1/2 on it from the first quote.

The life cycles is going to be about the same for new PV's as it was for the MD3000i PV's.

Your long term storage manufacturer is a long term partner for sure.   Our company absolutely can't buy new storage every 5 to 7 years.  Existing storage needs to continue to grow. 

[wdroush1]

JohnADCO wrote:

A 5 year life cycle would be a good candidate for the cheaper Powervault storage.

We figure we only have a couple of more years out of our PV's for sure.    We are going a different direction will allow us to keep using them though as long as we want. 

Yep,  the MD3000i is considered old.   Goes to show how specs aren't everything. Performance is good even compared to some heavy hitting modern solutions costing 5 time the price.     Our storage solution evaluations in the past year have been an eye opening experience for sure.

When we purchased out MD3000i's I was totally new to shared storage / iSCSI.    I do some volunteer work for a non-profit and they just got a whale of a deal on their new Powervault san.  Maybe because in the end they were non profit?  I am not sure,  I got the rep down almost 1/2 on it from the first quote.

The life cycles is going to be about the same for new PV's as it was for the MD3000i PV's.

Your long term storage manufacturer is a long term partner for sure.   Our company absolutely can't buy new storage every 5 to 7 years.  Existing storage needs to continue to grow. 

We're only going to have one SAN for ESXi + VDI + Dev + Test (if I'm lucky), so a 5-6 year refresh cycle isn't too hard (I mean that is an average of just a few grand a year for the backbone of our infrastructure), however I can understand how a larger infrastructure can only refresh one SAN at a time ever couple years and have to shift things around.

I'd love to get more life out of it, with DAS I could probably make it last longer (Actually I outright know it will last longer than an EQL simply because I can compensate with more spindles, where as the EQL is limited to it's 24 drives and 2GBe of active bandwidth), the question is probably mostly hardware compatability and quality, but with the MD3600 I actually have a hard drive compatability model list, and could order harddrives online after it falls out of warranty for dirt cheap (another plus).

[JohnADCO]

The drives can be had cheaper yes and not from Dell,  but I am sure all iSCSI PV's require you to use Dell certified drives.   So not ultra cheap like open market drives.

It's still the cheapest or at least of the cheapest enterprise storage out there in all honesty for sure.

I have enjoyed our time with the lowly PV's.    I mean we were getting fully populated MD3000i's for like $4K 5 years ago from our rep.  We purchased 6 of them.   :smileyhappy:

$24K-ish.

We run two vmware datacenters in production and one vmware datacenter in DR with them.  We actually purchased a spare for test and to have on hand parts around at those prices.

Compare that to what one EQL would cost or even would have cost back then?

[logiboy123]

At my current site we run both Equalogic and PowerVault systems.

The EqualLogic is rock solid, we never have any problems at all and I would consider buying one if I was in the position of doing so.

The PowerVaults are absolute peices of junk. The rubbish falls over all the time under normal load conditions. We have just finished resolving an on going Raid Controller failover issue that has been ongoing with Dell for a year. A whole year! Are you kidding me?! RUBBISH!

Having said all the above I would rather buy a LeftHand solution over a Dell solution any day. Dell is a desktop company trying to get into the SAN market. They lost the bidding wars on both the Lefthand and 3PAR systems and bought Equallogic instead. In life I find that most often you get what you pay for.

When buying your disks make sure you actually try to figure out how many IOPS you need to provision. Don't just buy disks because they are on special or because they give you heaps of storage. One of our arrays was bought with 2TB 7.2k disks and they reality is that we will never be able to fully populate the array because it cannot handle the IOPS requirement when it is fully loaded with VM's. Dell should never have sold that array with those disks without a warning on the IOPS throughput. This array was purchased long before I arrived so I had no say in the matter.

Regards,

Paul

[JohnADCO]

It does take an act of congress to get Dell to replace a controller even when you know that is what it is.   Pretty common in failovers that happen for no reason too.  

But our PV's never have went down so to speak, so it would be hard for me to lable them as rubbish.

I think the price difference says it all here on that note.

[wdroush1]

Paul Kelly wrote:

One of our arrays was bought with 2TB 7.2k disks and they reality is that we will never be able to fully populate the array because it cannot handle the IOPS requirement when it is fully loaded with VM's. Dell should never have sold that array with those disks without a warning on the IOPS throughput.

Regards,

Paul

Ugh, it's order like that which make vendors treat me like I'm retarded (even though they have to forward me onto an engineer for every basic question I have). :smileysad: Now I can't buy anything that is more complicated than lego in terms of SAN technology from our ESXi guys. I'm so blaming you now. :smileywink: I'm assuming you guys don't really have a "storage guy" on site, right? Because I always pen and paper my spindle setups before throwing layouts out.

That would be useful for backups and/or long term storage, maybe a handful of specific situations, but that's about it. Our dev system sits on 400GB RAID-10 SATA 2 drives right now, and I'm running out of room, could probably bump that to 1TB due to very light disk usage and mostly just needing room for the lab of VMs we'll have.

I'd never drop a 2TB in there for anything but ISO storage, and even then I start to worry about disk rebuild times.

JohnADCO wrote:

It does take an act of congress to get Dell to replace a controller even when you know that is what it is.   Pretty common in failovers that happen for no reason too. 

But our PV's never have went down so to speak, so it would be hard for me to lable them as rubbish.

I think the price difference says it all here on that note.

Two strikes in the same thread for Dell hardware replacement? It's been awhile since I've delt with Dell on that level, has it really gotten that bad? Bad hardware is going to happen no matter what the platform, what I depend on is: MTBF being high and: Dell not being stupid about replacing the bad part.

I always figured the price difference was "You know what you're doing" (PowerVault) vs. "We'll hold your hand" (EqualLogic), this applies basically everywhere in IT.

[logiboy123]

Quite honestly I've never had to push a vendor so hard for something that should have been quite simple.

In the end the fix was for them to write new firmware for our SAN's raid controllers. We are currently running beta firmware, but at least it is stable.

Like I said, you get what you pay for. There is a reason a Lefthand sells at the higher end of the price spectrum.

To be fair though and if you could be bothered you should really get each of the major vendors in to talk about what you are trying to achieve and what they can do for you; EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP to name some of the major ones.

Regards,

Paul

[wdroush1]

Paul Kelly wrote:

Quite honestly I've never had to push a vendor so hard for something that should have been quite simple.

In the end the fix was for them to write new firmware for our SAN's raid controllers. We are currently running beta firmware, but at least it is stable.

Like I said, you get what you pay for. There is a reason a Lefthand sells at the higher end of the price spectrum.

To be fair though and if you could be bothered you should really get each of the major vendors in to talk about what you are trying to achieve and what they can do for you; EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP to name some of the major ones.

Regards,

Paul

We looked into EMC, I like their hardware setup, but their software nickel and dime you todeath model is terrible. And I've been told numerous times that Dell > EMC on support, which after hearing how well Dell handled things, and EMC's tight control on our SANs, I kind of don't want to deal with them.

NetApp is discontinuing like 2/3rds of it's FAS models, bleh.

IBM has MD3600s (they're all rebranded LSIs to be honest).

We kinda poked at HP, may look back briefly, part of me is saying because we're locked in with this vendor we'll just go with the EQL after I voice my concerns and if anything bad comes of it, it wont be my fault. heh.

Looked at NexentaStor boxes, we'll be running one of those for backup (possibly even VDI if the EQL goes through, bleh), not sure about running it for full production though.

[sergeadam]

I had a MD1000 lose it's config for no discernable reason. I was on the phone with Dell for nearly 6 hours trying to reload it. In the end I had to send the array to data recovery. When it was back, Dell replaced both controllers, the backplane and 2 drives because they may have shown failure. No issue, no problems.

[JohnADCO]

I think the techs have a mandate to only replace the controllers as the absolute last resort.   Are the controllers in PV's still LSI?

If so?    Hmmmmm    A little flakeyness probably comes with the territory.

Our MD3000i's have been pretty good for us is about all I can say.   We didn't pay much, and we got what we paid for.

The renewals for support are inexpensive with Dell.   That cost is a factor for us in equipment purchase decisions.

[wdroush1]

JohnADCO wrote:

I think the techs have a mandate to only replace the controllers as the absolute last resort.   Are the controllers in PV's still LSI?

If so?    Hmmmmm    A little flakeyness probably comes with the territory.

Our MD3000i's have been pretty good for us is about all I can say.   We didn't pay much, and we got what we paid for.

The renewals for support are inexpensive with Dell.   That cost is a factor for us in equipment purchase decisions.

Yeah, apparently they're LSI, same with the IBM models.

sergeadam wrote:

I had a MD1000 lose it's config for no discernable reason. I was on the phone with Dell for nearly 6 hours trying to reload it. In the end I had to send the array to data recovery. When it was back, Dell replaced both controllers, the backplane and 2 drives because they may have shown failure. No issue, no problems.]

MD1000? How long ago was that? Do you have any recent Dell products? Have they gotten better with technical support?

[JohnADCO]

sergeadam?   So you basically lost the diskgroups on it?    Ouch...    We always try to put an extra MD1000 with big slow drives on all our MD3000i's to hold block level diskcopies to provide a basic level of enclosure protection.   As we have grown,  we have not been able to maintain that across all the MD3000i's because we are running out of space.

[JayDeah]

FYI i was just informed by vmware support that the MD32xx and 36xx have just been removed from the 5.0 HCL!

[wdroush1]

JayDeah wrote:

FYI i was just informed by vmware support that the MD32xx and 36xx have just been removed from the 5.0 HCL!

It's still there, but no hardware support like on 4.1U1 :smileysad:

[JohnADCO]

I'd settle for that on the MD3000i,  but I was told by Dell that they will never add it for version 5

[wdroush1]

JohnADCO wrote:

I'd settle for that on the MD3000i,  but I was told by Dell that they will never add it for version 5

Yeah, I can understand it though, it's aging and ESXi 5.0 seems to be throwing iSCSI errors at everyone on these boards.

As for my setup: Looks like we'll be going with an EQL for our server backbone, and I've been handed the task to see what I can do with NexentaStor with our blades, sat down for a little bit, thought about the hardware and realized I can have a HA setup (outside of the backplane of the blade chassis going) and most likely outperform the EQL.

This will be fun. :smileyhappy: