Last Friday, my fellow Dell EqualLogician Dylan Locsin and I had a chance to chat with one of our New England customers, Rich Casselberry at Enterasys, a part of the Siemens Enterprise Communications Group. Rich is the director of IT operations at Enterasys. Rich spoke recently at the New England VMware Users Group about a data center migration, and discussed a solution he architected using VMware and iSCSI (Dell EqualLogic) storage. We thought it’d be a good idea to catch up and chat about his story and the EqualLogic User Conference coming up March 1-4 in Dallas.
In a lot of ways, Enterasys is like many of Dell’s EqualLogic users. They’re a medium-to-large sized firm with a broad spectrum of storage needs, and this isn’t their first go-round with SAN technology. A couple years ago, they moved from Fibre Channel SAN over to an iSCSI-based SAN environment for a variety of reasons that they explain in the video. It’s also noteworthy that they’re not just running iSCSI for tier-2 apps but for their entire production IT environment, including 1,200 Exchange mailboxes (plus Blackberries), SAP, 100+ virtual servers, etc…
Using the marvels of pocket sized video camera technology, I was able to capture two videos, one with Casselberry and another with Rich Arnold, the SAN Administrator, about their environment and why they’re coming to the User Conference. My favorite part comes around 1:33 of the first video when Rich C. is talking about his concerns about setting up replication between two data center with iSCSI to enable their data center migration.
You can read more about Enterasys’ work with Dell in this case study, or hear the full story of their datacenter migration process from Rich & Rich themselves at the EqualLogic User Conference.
We look forward to seeing you there, too!