EqualLogic Adds "SAN Within A SAN" Capability

The new pooling capabilities gives solution providers and their customers the ability to separate data within a storage pool according to the characteristics of the data, said John Joseph, vice president of marketing for EqualLogic, Nashua, NH.

The end result is the ability to create a SAN within a SAN, Joseph said. "The data can be separated according to quality of service, physical location, or virtualization, allowing customers to do things like chargebacks," he said. "They can create different pools for specific departments, assign the pools, create and destroy pools as needed, and assign different RAID levels to different pools."

For example, Joseph said, while the storage administrator can see all the data in a SAN in a single view for management purposes, he can also set up different pools within that SAN for specific departments such as the sales department and engineering department.

That engineering department capacity can be carved into smaller sub-pools, with CAD, database, and e-mail files kept in a pool protected by high-performance RAID 10, and archive data in a pool protected by RAID 5. That data may be in a single array, or on multiple arrays in different locations. Data can be migrated between different physical locations or have new RAID levels assigned without impacting the user's performance, he said.

The new firmware is available with new PS Series arrays, including the new PS400E, which Joseph said is the first iSCSI storage array to use Seagate's new 750-Gbyte Barracuda SATA hard drives. The firmware can also be downloaded into previously-installed arrays at no charge, he said.

About 90 percent of EqualLogic's worldwide revenue comes from the company's 430 solution providers, who purchase arrays directly from the vendor, Joseph said.