Inside IT - All Comments

re: Is Greening Your Storage a Key Consideration Yet?

Bryan Martin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:21:12 GMT

Correction on my last comment: 10K drive data-center could equal $100K savings a year. 50K drive data-center could equal up to $500K.

re: Is Greening Your Storage a Key Consideration Yet?

Bryan Martin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:32:46 GMT

While green power is lower on the totem pole when it comes to HDD requirements, I'd have to place not where everything is equal but at the point where every application requirement has been met. Most data-center applications are random in nature. Even a purely sequential application becomes random when multiple users through multiple servers are hitting the storage simultaneously. The lower spin speed drives out perform within 10% of their faster counterparts but consume nearly 30% less power.

As mentioned earlier, it takes a lot of money to move heat around. An HDD saving just over $3 a year at the HDD level saves another $6+ in AC and associated costs for around $10 a year total. Throw these into a 10K unit data-center and we're talking $500K a year. This doesn't take into account the installations where there is fixed power availability and capacity requirements demand a way to get more storage with the same power.

I understand the repurposing drives scenario. You need to be able to make use of already purchased hardware whenever possible. When a faster HDD comes out with even better power, you can use the lower spin HDD's for most archival situations. Even at 5.4K RPM, the 3.5" 1TB still packs more than enough sustained sequential transfer speed to accommodate TBU's running at 100MB/sec compressed (50MB native).

re: Compellent publishes excellent review of Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays

Greg Veach — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:05:13 GMT

A very small pool was sampled.

316 total respondents provided 516 ratings.

18 Compellent

22 EQL

121 EMC

81 HP

66 Netapp

The rankings appear to basically be the reverse to the number of people who responded. The fewer the respondents the higher the rating. Therefore Compellent and EQL were close with Compellent edging out EQL as they had several fewer respondents.

re: Is Greening Your Storage a Key Consideration Yet?

Christopher — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:32:21 GMT

My only incentive for lowering power consumption would be heat. My power is not metered so there's no incentive there, but I spend a lot on pushing around heat. Given the high density of the current and future market, consideration for heat load can only grow.

Whether or not something is "green" is the final factor for me when considering a product; especially with disks. My job is to provide functionality while managing cost. After I satisfy those needs then I can be swayed one way or another by nice-to-haves such as power efficiency and the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process.

Cost remains the primary factor in determining whether or not I have the best, or just good enough. Since I frequently repurpose equipment I'd rather have hardware that can do anything. I start thinking about slower RPM hard drives for long-term archival only once I see that it cuts the price in half.

re: TechCenter Chat Today: Migrating from Insight to OpenManage

steve schaumburg — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:21:27 GMT

i have a virus and spyware and i need help to remove them. i didnt security on it

re: iSCSI or Fibre Channel – Why does everyone make you choose?

Allen Cole — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:10:16 GMT

If you tone down the "sales talk", e.g. "Today we’re announcing",or "With UltraFlex, you get two benefits" you will get a better response from the likely readers of the blog.

re: Microsoft Management Summit is very hot and Dell is in the buzz

stevepc — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:53:02 GMT

jsut tried the new Mp work great but still have the same issue on my management server and another sql 2005 server

The process started at 15:49:39 failed to create System.Discovery.Data, no errors detected in the output. The process exited with 0

Command executed: "C:\WINDOWS\system32\cscript.exe" /nologo "DellStorageDiscovery.vbs" {A349921D-3822-6F31-31E8-417183CCFD50} {B02FC5AA-2AE7-4E04-3664-93C60E7D72D9} Q-SVMOMOMTEST.Sobeys.com

Working Directory: C:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\Health Service State\Monitoring Host Temporary Files 6\1340\

One or more workflows were affected by this.

Workflow name: Dell.Connections.DellStorage.Discovery

Instance name: Q-SVMOMOMTEST.Sobeys.com

Instance ID: {B02FC5AA-2AE7-4E04-3664-93C60E7D72D9}

Management group: motech

Pour plus d'informations, consultez le centre Aide et support à l'adresse

re: Microsoft Management Summit is very hot and Dell is in the buzz

Richard K — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:40:06 GMT

Dell Management Pack v3.1 A01 is now available for download at the following link

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re: Microsoft Management Summit is very hot and Dell is in the buzz

Richard K — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:51:11 GMT

I've had v3.1 installed since the day it was released. Yes, we had to remove v3.0 first, but that wasn't a big deal.

What I am noticing though, is that most of the alerts are now set to be Information instead of Critical/Warning. And I'm not getting any alerts about failed Memory Devices at all.

So it seems that there might have been more to work on than just the failed upgrade from v3.0 to v3.1.

re: Signing off, it was truly a great ride

Jason Powell — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 02:43:29 GMT

Marc,

Thanks for work at EqualLogic and thanks for making a small shop like me feel just as important as a big IT shop with lots of arrays :-)

Look forward to seeing where you end up next.

Jason Powell