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I'm in the market again for storage and you may have already seen my discussions regarding EqualLogic and Dell's MD3220i arrays. I'm taking my search slow and have been awaiting EMC's new product announcement and will be making a trip next week to delve a bit deeper into Xiotech's product line. My focus in this article, however, is on EMC's new VNX and VNXe products. At Westminster, our existing EMC AX4 powers our modest virtual infrastructure which runs on four virtual hosts and supports about fifty or so virtual machines and does so very well. Given my outstanding experience with the AX4, I'm definitely leaning toward continuing with EMC.
Two new entrants in EMC's product line are the aforementioned VNX and VNXe, which combine EMC's Clariion and Celerra lines into a unified product. The VNX product line is the more traditional of the two lines while the VNXe products are targeted at small and medium enterprises. The VNXe line is an iSCSI-only affair supporting up to either 96 or 120 drives while, depending on model, the VNX line supports iSCSI, Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and supporting anywhere from up to 75 to 1,000 drives.

Figure 1 – VNXe

Figure 2 – VNX
Regardless of the model selected, all of EMC's new VNX and VNXe system use Unisphere, EMC's successor to Navisphere. Unisphere aims to make managing EMC devices much easier than it was in the past. This is one area in which EMC needed to play catch up to bring some ease of use to the game and I think they've accomplished that goal nicely.
There are a number of different models of the

At Westminster College, we've been testing VDI for quite some time in an effort to as closely as possible replicate the desktop-based user experience. As such, we've opted to use VMware's View 4.5 product and for some users, Teradici-based PCOIP terminals.

I've more recently started to consider the storage side of the equation and. While I believe that we can get a start with our existing EMC AX4, I want to be prepared should we need additional capacity or storage performance

At the same time, from an economic perspective, a VDI solution needs to have some kind of ROI, and storage can get pretty expensive. I started thinking about whether or not it would make sense to try to use something a bit less expensive for this purpose. I haven't yet come to a conclusion, but wanted to share with you my preliminary research, which is still early.

In an effort to bring a per-node VDI implementation price closer to a typical desktop/computer price, I started with something lower-end, but that seems like it could be viable: a Dell PowerVault MD3220i array equipped with 24 15K RPM SAS drives. Ignoring what might be other performance factors for now, this unit would provide more than 4,000 IOPS of read performance and more than 2,000 IOPS of RAID 10 write performance.

Not too shabby.

In speaking with Dell, they provided an extremely competitive price on his unit and also urged me to investigate the use of an EqualLogic array. They reminded me that the EQ array offers much more in the way of festers and that management is much simplified when compared to the MD3220i. They provid