Dell EqualLogic PS series Reviews

This is like a primary storage area for all our machines. We have a virtual environment where we have a number of virtual machines and a number of ESX hosts. We are in basically a VM-ware environment. Therefore, we have ESX hosts there, and those hosts are connected. All the virtual machines and user data and everything is stored on this.

The solution offers very good read capacities.

The size of the box we have is pretty decent.

The speed on offer is very good. 

We've found the initial setup to be fairly straightforward.

Dell's technical support is very good.

The number one is probably the scalability potential of the product. If I need to increase the capacity, I cannot. That's the main problem for us. If I need to have more space or more capacity, I need to replace the product. It would be ideal if we could scale without replacing the box itself.

We've been using the solution for the past six years at this point. I would say that it's been a good amount of time. 

The product is quite stable. We've used it for many years at this point without issue. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The solution does not scale well at all. It's a box, so we only have so much space to work with. If you need more space, you need to replace it with a bigger box.

Depending on which project we are working on, we have about 150-200 people who use the solution. While it may just be something that's in the background, everyone is using it.

Right now technical support is not under Dell's support as Dell just supports the solution for up to five years. After that, we have to get support from a third party.

While we did have Dell support, it was great. We were extremely satisfied with their level of service. Third party support has its limitations, to be honest. However, we're basically just using them to get hardware replacements and not software support.

We're currently on the hunt for a solution that would offer lower pricing.

The initials setup is not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward. We found it to be easy. We didn't run into difficulties.

Most are very easy setups compared to the technology that was available six years ago. They've really improved a lot of the setup since then.

Deployment is pretty fast. You can have everything up and running within a week or two.

We pay for licensing on a monthly basis.

Over the six years we've had the solution, the pricing has been rather reasonable. That said, we're always looking for solutions that allow us to lower costs.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Dell. 

We're working with model PS 4100.

While this is an older model, and technically no longer available, Dell does have other great models that are very useful. I'd definitely recommend this solution is the environment was the right fit.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The Dell EqualLogic PS series is a network-attached storage device.

Dell EqualLogic PS series could improve the performance because in our hybrid configuration the read speed is faster than the write speed.

I have used the Dell EqualLogic PS series within the last 12 months.

Dell EqualLogic PS series is a highly stable solution.

The scalability of the Dell EqualLogic PS series is very good, we had no issues.

The technical support from the Dell EqualLogic PS series is excellent.

The initial setup of the Dell EqualLogic PS series is very simple.

The number of people needed to maintain the solution depends on how many of them you have. If you have 100 Dell EqualLogic PS series devices, then you need more people to administer them. However, it has less to do with maintenance; it is more for administration.

Dell EqualLogic PS series was at its end of life and was replaced by Compellent, and Compellent will be at its end-of-life soon.

I would recommend others to choose Compellent because it is much better than the Dell EqualLogic PS series and is the next step in evolution.

I rate the Dell EqualLogic PS series a ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as an array and as a backup. I actually have two.

The solution has been extremely consistent over the years.

We've had absolutely no issues with the product at all. It's lasted a long time without causing any problems.

Technical support, when we had access to it, was very good.

We'd like the solution to have bigger sizing. We need more space and we can't get any. We'd love more memory storage space.

We've been using the solution for the last 10 years. It's been a decade. We've used it for a while.

The stability has always been excellent. the performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's worked. It's worked for a decade.

The scalability isn't really there. You have to have the same size drive in each slot. Therefore, you have to trade out all the slots if you're going to scale up, which makes it kind of difficult to do so.

The solution is at its end-of-life, and therefore we won't increase usage. We are retiring it.

While the solution has reached its end of life many years ago, and we haven't had technical support in years, before, when it was on offer, it was very good. We didn't have any complaints.

I wasn't present for the initial setup. It was a long time ago. I can't speak to how long it took or how easy or difficult it was as a process.

I'm not sure what the exact costs of the solution were originally. I don't have access to that information.

We are customers and end-users of Dell products. We just have an account that we've used and we've done business with them for years.

The solution has been discontinued by Dell for four, five years. Therefore, it's not exactly up-to-date. We couldn't update it if we wanted to. They don't make it anymore. It's not something a company can just buy.

In general, we have been very happy with the product. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

• We ran a large data housing solution that contained billions of data files. 
• We also used the product for VM storage and file server storage.
  

When initially purchased, it brought enterprise-class features to our systems. Very solid manageability and the product worked well with few technical or hardware issues. The performance was never very good, and its latency was higher than expected.

• Enterprise features for snapshot management and replication benefited us greatly.
• The ability to quickly view and select from snapshots allowed us to restore data very quickly.
• Replication allowed us to move data from one data center to another with ease.
  

• Performance and vision for the product were lacking. 
• DELL was taking on too many storage solutions, and it felt like the EqualLogic series was not aggressively supported.

We use it for virtual machines and data. It performed well but it's end-of-life now. We have to refresh everything. It's still working but it's end of support for the product.

It did what it was supposed to do and it worked well. 

High availability. It has a lot of redundancy and good management software as well as good alerting.

Some of the new features include what they call auto-tiering, where data that needs to be on a faster storage, it would automatically detect that and move it to the faster storage or the most frequently accessed area. Data that doesn't move that much or is not accessed that often would go on a slower storage. It's more efficient, helps a company to maximize what they spend. This kind of storage costs a lot of money; they build that into the newer functionality and into newer SANs.

If you are going to go with all-flash then it's very expensive but it has a lot of performance benefits and a lot of improvement in reliability. Some companies can afford leading edge. My company cannot afford leading edge, so we probably have to go one generation below.

It's very stable. We have had no issues.

You have to determine your size as a company, if you're a small business, medium, or enterprise. The model that we bought was scaling to about a small- to medium-size business, but they give you enterprise functionality. That was the EqualLogic. But if we were bigger or we planned to grow or acquire, we probably would have selected Compellent or some other product line.

You have to make sure you buy the right fit for you to scale because if you're a small company and you don't plan to expand, then this is a solution for you. If you plan to grow, then you need to buy a different model or different solution.

The one that we're buying now is a unified storage solution. It's kind of expensive when you buy the EqualLogic solution because, as you grow, you have to keep buying another controller. It can be more expensive with time.

At the end of the day, you have to remember that every three to five years you have to toss this equipment away and buy a new one. You don't want to overspend.

The support was excellent. When there are alerts, they would get them and they would be on it right away, and they would send a technician to replace. If there was a hard drive that failed or controller that failed, they would send a technician. It was always up, never down. Very good support.

We have alerts. Then the lifecycle refresh time came up, end-of-life. Now, you can continue getting support from a third-party who would support for 10 years after the end-of-life. What triggered us to make a change is the fact that we're running our production data on equipment that is no longer supported by the manufacturer.

When selecting a vendor support is key, support and part-availability. The features, they are important too, but the most important thing to me and to us is the fact that, if there is a problem, the company will support you. Dell does an excellent job of support.

We had HPE before. In my country, the local support vendor of HPE wasn't as diligent as Dell, but that may be different in another jurisdiction. I'm in the Bahamas, so if I was in America maybe I would have a different opinion.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward.

The last five to seven years we went with Dell and they are a good vendor so we continued with them. The only difference is that EMC products have been acquired by Dell. 

It's now end-of-life, end of support, so we're shopping around for a replacement. With all this technology, they only have a lifespan of three to five years and then new features and new functionality come along. New speed. The new ones perform at much faster speed, so you have to change everything often.

I'd give the EqualLogic solution a seven out of 10. It is an entry-level SAN for the enterprise. We're a small business. The price point was good for us and it's scalable; we could buy as many modules as we need, as we grow. They work together. The management of it is good but it can't go higher than a seven because, like I say, it's entry-level. It doesn't have all the functionality and features of some of the more expensive ones. But again, based on the budgets we have to work with, it was the best we could afford.

It is shared storage for VMware.

It was necessary to enable a lot of the advanced functions of VMware.

When we bought it, we were attracted by the flexibility of being able to put in a new shelf whenever we needed to, to expand.

They may already have a product, but I would be interested in either hybrid-flash or possibly an all-flash option.

Three of the four devices have been rock solid, and one of them had a string of issues that we eventually resolved. Overall, pretty good.

Scalability is pretty good.

Technical support has been good to us.

We used NetApp for a while, but we hated the interface. That is why we switched.

When selecting a vendor, at this point I am looking for someone who can talk technical stuff with me, not just throw a storage number at me and then expect me to figure everything out.

It was pretty straightforward. The first time around, we didn't completely understand how much space we were going to need for things like Snapshots and replication. So we didn't buy enough storage the first time.

Licensing is pretty straightforward.

I would give this solution an eight out of 10. It's pretty straightforward most of the time, and tech support is there when it's not straightforward. I'm giving them a knock for having had that string of hardware problems.

The biggest hangup for us was knowing how much disk translates into how much actual space you have, when you're done doing the setup.

It has contributed to the implementation of virtualization and all its benefits.

• Reliability
• Ease of implementation
• Performance

1. Why is it not possible for both controllers to be simultaneously active (load balancing)?
2. The searchable online documentation is missing.

None.

Not yet.

I can't say as we have had no significant issues.

No previous company. We migrated from a PS4110.

Initial setup was straightforward. We had an EqualLogic course.

It is a fair price.

We evaluated NetApp and EMC.

Be sure the product is suitable, the warranty is guaranteed, and technically, use a disk (RAID) calculator for sizing.

Synchronous replication. One group, one pool, one IP address, the member stands in two different datacenters with, for example, two hosts in DC1 and two hosts in DC2 in same ESX cluster. If you have one datacenter fail, the VMs will start to run inside the other data center.

EQL is pure block storage. EQL has not improved anything. It created a rigid change regime and bureaucracy after several firmware upgrade failures.

Block size, controllers, failover mechanism in general for the controllers. 6510 and 6610 have two iSCSI connections in each controller. Why do 6110xxx members have only one, and why do the same members have the possibility of having an active iSCSI interface in the passive controller? It could make a lot of noise with a failover.

Five years.

This product was very unstable in the beginning. A pool with more than one member could get crazy and start to empty one member to another member (if the pool went below 10% free capacity [from Dell], for real EQL processes started between 11-12% capacity). One member became full and crashed production which used the EQL pool.

Fixed somewhere in v.6.1.x!? Two 6510es in pool generate, for example, 125TB. So we need 10% free capacity, 12.5TB in the pool to make sure EQL does not go crazy.

Number of iSCSI connections. The EQL group has a maximum of four pools (at least in v.7xxx). You need at least one pool as a "maintenance" pool. In practical terms, we have only three useful pools in one group.

Horrible. Very rarely do you meet people with a passion for the product. Meaning, how can people have passion for this product series?

Started with 14x 6110x to run OS and regular data and some SQL. Filled up the IO long before capacity. Split up the groups and reformatted some of the EQLs to RAID 10 to run only the OS. That worked well. IO and storage capacity was quite even. Dell was very positive against snapshots. They forgot about their 15-16MB block size. Local snapshots on data stores which only run OS which generates 20% random reads and around 80% writes.

Data retention was one snap each day in a seven day rotation. We got around 150% on the top of the datastore in only snapshot storage. EQL cheap? Hmmm... I don't think so.

Straightforward.

All features are out of the box. The license will be in the virtual, OS, or application layer.

Do not go for EQL. It will be out of production in a few years. Dell EMC Unity is a much better option for price, performance, and safety.

If you don't have alternatives, management should be fired! But seriously, you need to have very good control of your workload and IOPS. Which data cause random reads, sequential reads, random writes, sequential writes, etc. And you need to build your environment. The workload needs to be separated in VMs on different disks which touch different data stores and SAN environments.

Our relationship with Dell EMC is very good. Dell has always been a good hardware vendor and are really good at it. They are also good in local storage in, for example, their MD series. Really good!

They could not make the SAN part in EQL and Compellent. Maybe that was the reason Dell bought EMC.

We are also using Dell F10 which provides quite good performance. Hardware is the same as Cisco, but there are some downs with their software. F10 doesn't have any control over some packages, such as pause frames. The switch will try to send those packages to all ports. So if you have activate flow control, you need to turn off RX or TX or the switch will flood all the ports with "unknown" packages.

In the end. We will replace all EQLs with Dell EMC Unity. We have not upgraded EQL after 7.1.8, which is quite stable, because firmware upgrades cause us alot of trouble.