Joikuspot on N95 8GB NAM

Joiku Light Beta v1.1 on Nokia N95 8gb AT&T w/ 3.5G showing 75% signal strength.

I'll have to test my Sprint EVDO rev.A broadband card for comparison.

MBA Side view

MBA Open

New MBA

Kaiser Ontario JV trailer

A shot of the in progress setup in Ontario.
On the left side you can see the Shoregear 90 phone switch along with a cheapo netgear wireless router hooked up to the Adtran T1/VOIP box. Theres also a Dlink 26 port POE switch there to power all the phones. Gone missing was a watchguard router and Dell 48 port POE switch. They just got up and walked away! damnit.

Shoretel

Shoretel IP115 phone. Why did I shoot this upside down? i have no idea. If you want a better look at it, do a headstand.

ADTRAN eth & DS1 ports

Dell PowerConnect 5448 iSCSI switch

2 for <$2000!

Supports jumbo frames, flow control, layer2, w/ VLAN support. Currently testing it out with our EqualLogic SANs.

Dell PE1950 III

What a steal for these machines. Even direct from Dell they're a great deal.

• Dual Quad Core 2.5GhZ Xeons w/ 12MB Cache (45nm chips)
• 4GB (win 2k8 32bit machines) or 32GB (for VMWare hosts)
• 256MB Cache BBU Hardware RAID 1 with 2x 146GB 15K RPM Drives
• DRAC 5 (remote access card)
• Quad Port Intel Pro 1000 PT PCIe Card
• Redundant Power Supplies

4GB version costs us less than the base model HP DL360 G5, and the 32GB version costs us about 2/3rds of what a comparable HP.

Infrastructure update

I've started this blog while in the middle of our big infrastructure update.



You name it, we're updating it:

1. New Cat6e homeruns


2. All new Dell PE1950 III Servers


3. Windows 2008 Server


4. VMware VI3


5. EqualLogic SAN (PS100E + PS5000XV)

Yes we're putting in an iSCSI SAN. I've even purchased a couple of the new Dell PowerConnect 5448 Switches ($900 each!) that are supposedly designed especially for iSCSI traffic. Although I've heard bad things about Dell switches, I could not pass them up at that price. I'll just test them out and if they don't meet performance expectations, I'll ship them back and pick up either a Cisco 2960G or HP 2810 Switch. I don't have the budget to do redundant switches if I Cisco or HP, though.

Back to the EqualLogic iSCSI boxes. We looked at 5 vendors total: LeftHand, IBM, EMC, NetApp, and EqualLogic. Here is my progression of logic in choosing EqualLogic over LeftHand:

• EqualLogic & Lefthand are not "tier one" providers of SANS (some may argue this now that Dell has bought EqualLogic.) In comparing these two solutions, I tried digging into independent reviews/comparisons of midrange SANs. Lefthand does not appear in many of these reviews as it seems like many in the storage industry do not consider LeftHand as serious a contender in this space as NetApp, EMC, or EqualLogic


• Lefthand SANs configured properly and within my budget would only give me 50% of RAW disk space as usable space. Now this changes when you add more boxes of disks, but at this point, we're looking at what we can immediately use.


• Lefthand had single controllers in its boxes.


• According to Microsoft ESRP (Exchange Solution Review Program), LeftHand would handle less users per disk.


• Lefthand was only recently certified with VMware

Performance was a major driver in this project as CAD Engineers are apparently not very patient. ;) With LeftHand off the table, I focused my attention on NetApp, EMC, and IBM.

• EMC, NetApp and IBM (DS3000) are all controller + "dumb bay of disks" type SANs. EqualLogic has 2GB cache + redundant 3x GigE Ports on each bay of disks. Everytime you install a new bay, you gain more cache and more potential bandwidth.


• EMC, NetApp & IBM were very expensive for yearly maintenance (10K+) on hardware and software was ala carte. EqualLogic was all inclusive (like LeftHand).


• NetApp does have dedupe included which was very attractive when considering we will be moving our servers to VI3.


• The IBM DS3000 is a rebranded LSI product which is what the Dell MD3000 is based on. Overall not a great performing product in comparison to the EqualLogic.


• EMC was only certified "five 9's" reliability rating less than a year ago in their midrange product: http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2007/05/five_nines_and_.html


• EqualLogic has been "five 9's" for 3+ years.


• Performace: EqualLogic has all comers (even many fiber channel!) beat: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb412165.aspx

I believe I'll have the SAN in hand next week so I'll do some testing and report back!

Peace out!

Hello!

I'm starting this blog to keep track of the IT projects I have here at Murray.