Please review the link and information on the DR4000 which is specifically for backup. This is not a Production SAN like EqualLogic or Compellent.

Thank you.
Marc

Going through Dell is the only official way that I know of to accomplish what you would like to do.

Thank you.
Marc

We bought two Equallogic 300E units from an auction for a few thousand dollars. In our lab, we found out that all four controllers don’t have the firmware flash cards in them. As a result, we could not boot the units, the fan LEDs are red and the controllers do not engage (ACT LED not green).

We had access to working controllers from other 300E units and we did the following tests:

1. Took controllers from existing working units and put them in the just-bought units. Worked! This confirms that both just-bought units are fine except that they don’t have the firmware.

2. Took the compact flash cards from existing working units and put them in the controllers of the just-bought units. Does not work! This confirms that the firmware versions are different.

I would like to know how I can get the proper firmware for these controllers. Do you know anybody that can fix them for a reasonable price.

We contacted Dell and it would cost around 3K to put each unit under warranty. We can afford this price tag and we intended to use them for testing.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Joseph

A Single Array can only be configure with a single raid type. In this case your PS4000 can either be configured with R10 or R50, not both.

Hopefully you are running the latest version of SANHQ and EqualLogic Firmware. With SANHQ you can review the RAID Simulator which will show what the performance would be of your current array if you converted from R10 to R50. You can convert your single array from R10 to R50 without any downtime. The conversion will take a while and run in the background. You cannot go from R50 to R10 so please remember this if you convert from R10 to R50.

Thank you.
Marc

We have a PS4000vx and we are running Vmware 4.1 with 10-15 different servers one of them which is an SQL2008 server. My question is we are running RAID 10 right now but are wanting to change a few things up for extra space. I was thinking about converting it to RAID 50 but am unsure of the performance loss from RAID 10. But then I saw that you can change the RAID based on the volume.

So is it possible to change the entire storage group to RAID 50 giving us more space. But then creating a volume and making it RAID 10 for our more IO intensive servers? Would that give us the space we need and the performance we want?

Please contact EqualLogic Support. Since you have PowerConnect switches, EqualLogic Support can assist in confirming the correct setup.

Thank you.
Marc

My company just purchased a Dell PS6100 with two PowerConnect 6224′s to create our first SAN as we were in need of a storage solution. I am tasked with putting it all together and trying to follow best practice but lots of information second guesses itself. The SAN network will be isolated, with the exception of the port for management, and the two 6224′s are going to be stacked. In terms of setting up the ports on the stack, there is conflicting information regarding Portfast and Spanning Tree Protocol. Some documentation says to enable portfast and some says not to. The eight ports from the PS6100 will be split between both 6224′s. Also, each server has 2 ports that will go out to each of the 6224′s as well. When configuring the switch, what is the optimal configuration that I should be working with?

Thanks!