Buying stuff

We made the decision for our new iSCSI SAN: an EqualLogic PS3700X. It has 16 400GB 10k rpm SAS drives, for a total of 4.8 TB usable space. We were planning on purchasing a PS3600X (300GB drives), and I'm glad we decided to wait as long as possible for newer products. For the extra 1.4 TB we only paid about $1k more. We are also looking at purchasing a PS83E for off-site replication, but that's not a definite yet.

Yesterday there was an announcement that Dell was purchasing EqualLogic. I've heard a few people's opinions on this, and everyone for the most part seems to be apathetic. I don't have the impression that Dell will screw up what a great company EqualLogic is, and I'm also not worried about support. From my perspective, everything should stay the same. Marc Farley from EqualLogic is keeping a good summary of the reactions from the internet over at his Storage @ Work blog. On a side note, our LeftHand salesman (which I had recently informed that they lost to EqualLogic) was emailing me this morning trying to use the situation to their benefit. Nice.

We are also in the process of upgrading our network infrastrucure. We are purchasing a Cisco 4510 with 6 48-port/gigabit/PoE cards and 2 48-port/gigabit cards. We are also purchasing 3 Cisco Catalyst 3560G-48PS switches for our IDF closets, and a 3560G-48TS for our iSCSI SAN.

One of the things we wanted to implement was a way to dynamically assign VLANs based on MAC address. I've already written a script that is currently storing all of our MAC addresses in a SQL database when users log in. There are a couple different technologies that will accomplish this (VMPS, URT, 802.1x), but we haven't picked one yet. It seems that Cisco is trying to phase out VMPS in favor of 802.1x, and I can't find a lot of information on the internet regarding VMPS usage. URT is in the same boat, and one guy on the internet seems to think they were both "Cisco trying to figure out which direction to go in". 802.1x seems great, but it's more than we really need. It dynamically assigns VLANs as an afterthought; it's main purpose is port-security regulated by user authentication. That's great, but what about our 40 or so network printers that don't support 802.1x? What about our thin clients that need to PXE boot? So yeah, I'm still researching other possibilities. When it's done, I'll be sure to post a detailed explanation of how we did it, because I can't really find anything that is straightforward and gives a complete picture (most miss the section about how to get MAC addresses into the actual database).

LeftHand introduces iSCSI target appliance for ESX server

LeftHand Networks recently announced a software iSCSI target for ESX Server. It basically lets you reclaim all your unused disk space in your ESX box, and stick it on your SAN. I'm excited about this, we maxed out our ESX box to hold us over until we purchase our SAN, and this is a perfect way to use all that space. I'm thinking VM backups in case we lost the SAN for some reason. Or maybe IT storage (ISOs, Ghost images). We'll evaluate our needs after our EqualLogic box gets here and the local drives on the ESX server are emptied.