iSCSI

More musical chairs: EqualLogic exec changes roles within Dell

One of the public faces of EqualLogic has a new role within the company that acquired it, Dell officials confirmed today.

John Joseph, formerly VP of marketing for the iSCSI SAN vendor, has been shifted to a new position as Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Marketing. A Dell spokesperson described the shift in an email to SearchStorage:

John has taken on a new role within Dell focused on integrating solutions. This move comes on the heels of Dell’s recent announcement that it will organize itself around three major customer segments – large enterprise, public sector, and small and medium businesses. John’s move further demonstrates the success of the EqualLogic acquisition and its integration into Dell and the importance of storage in Dell’s enterprise business solutions.

Asked for clarification on what exactly “integration” means, the spokesperson offered further,

The role focuses on bringing our different products together (storage, servers, etc.) and making sure we addressing our customer’s data center needs. So yes, he will still have contact with all storage products as well as servers, services, and software. Customers want a ready tested and certified IT solution from Dell and we’re responding.

So Joseph will still have contact with the EqualLogic products, but it seems to have gotten more remote–or at least more mixed in with other duties. Duties, we might note, that seem a bit removed from his previous role in marketing for an iSCSI SAN platform that Dell positions for SMBs and the midrange. Presumably, enterprise solutions require some high-scale, Fibre Channel activities as well.

More importantly, Joseph was, as mentioned above, a public symbol for EqualLogic and is closely associated with that company and its products. His continued presence at the wheel following the acquisition was one of the more encouraging signs I saw for the Dell/EqualLogic integration.

Storage vendors put together ESX iSCSI cookbook

Just came across a pretty interesting resource on EMC’er Chad Sakac’s Virtual Geek blog (first brought to my attention by Stephen Foskett). It’s a guide to ESX and iSCSI co-developed by, among others, Andy Banta of VMware, Vaughn Stewart of NetApp, Eric Schott of Dell/EqualLogic, Adam Carter of HP/Lefthand, and David Black of EMC.

The post gets into nitty-gritty details and even includes what look like scanned-in napkin drawings to illustrate some of the complexities of performance management using ESX 3.x server with iSCSI. There are multiple links to futher resources on everything from the fundamentals of link aggregation to the full iSCSI spec.

But the bottom line for storage users is that “the ESX 3.x software initiator only supports a single iSCSI session with a single TCP connection for each iSCSI target…So, no matter what MPIO setup you have in ESX, it doesn’t matter how many paths show up in the storage multipathing GUI for multipathing to a single iSCSI Target, because there’s only one iSCSI initiator port.”

There are ways around it–in short, the post states, “Use the ESX iSCSI software initiator. Use multiple iSCSI targets. Use MPIO at the ESX layer. Add Ethernet links and iSCSI targets to increase overall throughput. Ser your expectation for no more than ~160MBps for a single iSCSI target.”

There’s also a workaround for single LUNs needing more than 160 MBps, using an iSCSI initiator in the guest along with MPIO, though the post acknowledges, “It has a big downside…you need to manually configure the storage inside each guest, which doesn’t scale particularly well from a configuration standpoint – so for most customers [say] they stick with the ‘keep it simple’ method.”

The best news out of this post for VMware and iSCSI users, though, is probably the pre-announcement that this behavior will be changing in future ESX releases.