Recently INetU Labs put Dell’s low cost workgroup SAN through its paces to see how it compares to the more robust (and costly) Equallogic and EMC offerings. The results are in, and it seems that correctly configured, the MD3000i is great product with plenty of bang for your buck.
Configuration
For testing we used an MD3000i populated with a mix of 146GB SAS and 500GB SATA drives. The SAN shipped with a single controller but a second was added to test failover. A word of warning here – Dell configures the duplex mode based on how the SAN is ordered; if you add a second controller later you’ll need to use the command line tool to enable it, a process that’s not stated as a clear requirement and takes a little digging on the Internet to find documentation for. That being said, once you find the docs you’ll have it set in no time. Our test unit was a major firmware revision behind, and bringing it up to date took a good twenty minutes. Minor revision updates probably won’t take as long, but this is something to keep in mind if you’re striving for multiple nines of availability.
Once the hardware was configured and updated, the software install was a snap. The management software is somewhat cumbersome but gets the job done, and configuring the LUNs is a simple process. We were testing multipath (MPIO), and Dell requires a specific version of the iSCSI initiator on Windows servers, so be careful here, too. Fortunately, the supplied driver CD made sure the right version was installed.
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