EqualLogic PS3800XV Storage Array

Most of the attention given to rack mounted storage over the last year has been around the explosion in secondary storage - devices containing large capacity SATA drives. While some vendors have been happy to target these as primary storage, their large capacities and slower speeds are not well suited to high speed, transactional environments.

To address this market, EqualLogic has released the PS3800XV, the first in a range of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) devices that are direct replacements for fibre channel SCSI arrays. The target market is those running databases, mail servers and even CAD systems.

The PS3800XV comes fully assembled. The chassis contains 16 x 15,000 rpm SAS drives each capable of holding 147GB and mounted in their own caddies. To power these drives there are two 450W hot plug power supplies.

Network and communications is handled through controller boards and the PS3800XV ships with two controllers, each of which has three gigabit Ethernet ports and a serial port.

There is a separate box containing accessories and inside here you will find serial and power cables. There is an anti-static band should you need to work inside the enclosure and rack mount kit with rails. Two documentation packs contain quick start kit, hardware guide and software.

What is missing is also of interest. EqualLogic see no need to ship a spare drive. This is because these are SAS and not SATA drives so they are less likely to fail. No network cables was a surprise.

Getting started was not quite as easy as expected. As the PS3800XV comes fully loaded it becomes a heavy box. In order to get it into the rack without risking any injury takes a little time.

Mounting the rails in the rack and onto the chassis was very easy. Before installing, however, we removed all of the drives. They slid out smoothly with no force needed. The drives have plenty of airflow around them so even though they are spinning at 15,000 rpm, any heat generated is easily dissipated.

We also removed the two PSUs to reduce the weight of the chassis and these slid out with no problems. Out of interest, we also removed the two controller cards which provided us with access to the Compact Flash cards that they use to store system settings.

Once this was done, the weight was very manageable and the chassis was quickly inserted into the rack.

Reinserting everything was quick and easy. Once all of this had been done, we connected the power leads attached the PS3800XV to the gigabit switch and fired up the array. Power-up took a little time as the drives seemed to spin up individually. This allowed up to see how much vibration there was as each drive was added and the unit was rock solid.

Connectivity to the network needs to be thought through. EqualLogic suggest two options. The first is to connect port zero on each controller card to the network switch. This is the minimum network configuration. For fault tolerance, you need to connect to multiple switches. Simply connecting all the ports to a single switch gains nothing.

Like all EqualLogic products, there is a quick way and a long way to initialise and configure an array. Previous EqualLogic products have required that the initial configuration was done through a DOS tool using a machine connected directly to the array. In a clear improvement, we were able to start with the GUI tool. The only time we went to the DOS tool was to completely reset the array before returning it to EqualLogic.