UNSOLVED
EQL_Pain Points
Hi Friends,
need to discuss few questions and need your advice on some of the pain points that i am facing while pitching EQL to customers.
The questions are listed below:
1: Block size of EQL is 16 MB which is very large as compare to SANs in the market. Which is why it occupies large space in snapshots and during relications.
2: the controllers are active passive and if i have a multi-port controllers and one of the ETH link is down the eql will continue to run on the same controller rather than failing over to the passive controller. This is my assumption correct me if i am wrong as i havent tested it.
waiting for your response.
thanks
JS
886
0
Posted March 7th, 2014 06:00
Hi joerg,
lox at 15MB :D...BUT How can we justify the first point ..?? when it comes to replication and snapshot space consumption.
Thanks
886
1
Posted March 7th, 2014 06:00
1. I thought it would be only 15MB ;) Well.. in the near feature there will be compression support for snapshots to reduce size.
2. EQL was active/standby not active/passive and since PS41xx/61xx there is a feature called "vertical portfailover". Is a eth/cable/switch port goes down the active CM use the ethX from the standby CM. So this is not a pain point anymore.
Regards,
Joerg
886
0
Posted March 16th, 2014 15:00
You likely can't justify it. That is why it is such a common knock against the feature. While the SAN based replication and snaps are certainly better than nothing, the reality is that these days, one is FAR better off abstracting protection away from your arrays. I speak as a user who leveraged array based snaps and replicas on EqualLogic arrays for 5+ years. Once I made the change to let software take care of that, the manageability and cost benefits was night and day.
886
0
Posted March 17th, 2014 07:00
What software do you use for (software based) replication? Veeam, Dell's AppAssure, or something else? And for what scale is that (as I've heard that AppAssure doesn't scale all that well and their support is hard to get a hold off).
886
0
Posted March 17th, 2014 08:00
I use Veeam, and protect about 80TB of data. But essentially any VADP based approach will work, with the point being to let software hook into the vSphere APIs to do all of the work. (don't get me started on AppAssure...) The transition away from array based feature sets for protection to software has been a profound improvement. No more indelible tie to firmware updates for feature adds and compatibility. Such a huge improvement on storage efficiency that I was able to go to a less penalizing (in writes) RAID type. And being able to protect the data onto targets that are not necessarily EqualLogic has more than offset (by an order of magnitude) any initial investment in the software.
Origin3k
6 Operator
•
2421 Posts
•
12396 Points
886
0
Posted March 7th, 2014 06:00
Nothing have changed for snapshot and replication yet. For us its not a big deal because we only use SyncRep in the LAN and no Aysnc. Replication and also no Snapshots.
Regards,
Joerg