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In The News

Dell EqualLogic Customer Connection
Your Resource for Furthering Your SAN Investment - August 2009

In This Issue:

Product News
Question of the Month
Company News
Best Practices
Customer Profile
Technical Alert
Latest Software Releases



Product News Back to top

Introducing the EqualLogic PS4000 for Remote Office, and Small Deployments

The new Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS4000 Series is a line of midrange iSCSI SANs designed to meet the needs of your remote or branch offices, departmental SAN deployments and small to medium-sized storage requirements. The PS4000 can help you extend data center-class best practices for virtualization, disaster recovery to the branch office easily & affordably.

Consider the PS4000 if you need to:
  • Consolidate servers and storage for remote/branch offices or small to medium-sized operations
  • Support a moderate-sized virtualized server environments
  • Centralize storage management and data protection for remote offices
  • Start with a small SAN that can scale-out as workloads increase

As with your current EqualLogic array, the PS4000 is easy to deploy and manage, and can grow with your business by interoperating with all other PS Series arrays.

Standard EqualLogic family features are included:
  • Advanced hypervisor integration for VMware® vSphere, Microsoft® Hyper-V™ and Citrix® XenServer™
  • Built-in data protection, recovery, high availability and data management features including snapshots, replication, clones, multipathing and more
  • Remote monitoring of performance, capacity and alarms with SAN Headquarters
Dell ProSupport Can Help Reduce Downtime
We know downtime equals lost productivity and revenue. That’s why Dell ProSupport* gives you fast access and less wait time to highly trained technicians in an average 2 minutes or less, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Dell ProSupport also enables you to build a support solution based on who you are, how you use technology, and where you want to allocate your IT resources. To learn more about Dell’s ProSupport options and availability go to www.dell.com/prosupport. *Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit www.dell.com/servicedescriptions

Questions of the Month Back to top


Q: Are EqualLogic arrays compatible and supported with the new VMware ESX v4/vSphere servers?


A:Yes, we have passed VMware’s certification for vSphere. The minimum recommended array firmware is 4.0.7 in the 4.x.x family and 4.1.4 in the 4.1.x family.

Click here for a list of supported EqualLogic models from VMware’s support website

Q: Does EqualLogic ASM/VE 1.0.x support vSphere?


A:No, ASM VMware edition v1.0.x does not work with ESX v4/vSphere. However, ASM/VE v2.0 will. That is expected to be released late summer 2009.

Company News Back to top

INTRODUCING THE NEW DELL EQUALLOGIC CUSTOMER SUPPORT SITE
Customer Support Site Image

New features include:

  • Simplified Navigation
  • Optimized page layout for quick browsing, making it easier to search and download software updates, knowledgebase, tech reports and FAQs
  • Account management – In addition to Case Management, a New feature Service Plan Status had been added which allows you to view warranty and service status information on your Dell EqualLogic arrays.
To view the New EqualLogic Customer Support Site go to
https://www.equallogic.com

Best Practices Back to top

Deploying Microsoft Hyper-V with PS Series Arrays
This technical report details information and best practices for deploying Microsoft® Hyper-V™ with Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI storage arrays. www.equallogic.com/uploadedFiles/Resources/White Papers


Customer Profile Back to top
Customer Profile Image

ENGINEERING MANAGEABLE GROWTH

Company:
ENGlobal (NASDAQ: ENG), an energy engineering and professional services firm, is determined to avoid this scenario. "We offer our customers quality, rapid deployment and an experienced staff," says Alex Schroeder, IT manager. "But we want our experts focused on innovation and on being the best in our industry. They can’t all participate in the growth of the company. For us, the challenge has been keeping up with acquisitions and expansion."

Challenge:
After an outsourcing arrangement proved too expensive, energy engineering firm ENGlobal brought its IT systems and administration—along with backup and recovery—back in-house.

Solution:
Dell worked with partner Symantec to provide ENGlobal with a data protection and deduplication solution running on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers and Dell EqualLogic™ iSCSI storage arrays.
Read more (pdf)

Technical Alert Back to top
Subject: ESX 4/ESXi 4 software iSCSI initiator patch for service unavailable issue. An issue has recently been identified with the VMware ESX 4 and ESXi 4 software iSCSI initiator. Volumes may not remain connected to the ESX/ESXi host during an array upgrade or controller failover. The affected VMFS volumes will no longer be displayed in the ESX GUI. A rescan of the storage adapter will restore them. Any running VMs on those volumes would have to be restarted.

This has been corrected with the following patches from VMware:

ESX 4.0: ESX400-200906413-BG (KB# 1012232)

ESXi 4.0: ESXi400-200906401-BG (KB# 1011856)

Note: The Qlogic iSCSI HBA does not have this issue; it’s specific to the software iSCSI adapter bundled with ESX v4.0.

Please download and apply the patch appropriate for your environment.


Latest Software Releases Back to top
PS Series Arrays Firmware
  • Version 4.0.7
  • Version 3.3.3 Patch L2

Version 3.3.2 Patch L2 For more information or to download these lastest software releases go to https://www.equallogic.com/support/download.aspx?id=1502.


Dell Blogs Back to top

Visit Dell “Inside IT” for news on things that matter in information technology. http://direct2dell.com/insideit/default.aspx



Scheduled Events

Live and OnDemand EqualLogic Product Demos Includes PS Series arrays, VMware integration, SQL and Exchange integration specific demos

To Learn More

Please Contact Us for more information about upcoming scheduled seminars and webcasts from VR6systems.