A Travel Rack Worth Looking At

A travel rack worth looking at...

Highlighting a number of innovations in server, storage and networking technology, this collection of equipment was designed from the ground up to provide a comprehensive platform to showcase all Bally Technologies systems and features in real world environments. 

Network

Like many enterprise minded technology companies, we have a long history of utilizing CISCO networking equipment in our infrastructure. We have been testing third party switching gear in our own lab environments and found that we can effectively integrate several with our existing infrastructure. An excellent example of that is the HP 5120 series of switches. The A5120, shown above, is a feature rich very capable device that allows for layer 3 interfacing directly into our CISCO core switching and with all the power to assume the role of a core switch in its own right.

Servers and Storage

At the heart of the system we have the HP c7000 Chassis and 8 ProLiant BL 465c Gen 8 blade servers. The blade chassis gives us the density we need in compute resources in a relatively small footprint that still allows for growth if we require it down the road. Each blade provides 16 physical CPU cores in AMD’s outstanding Opteron 6212 flavor that hits a perfect bang for buck sweet spot for virtualizing on the scale we intended to here. Each blade also provides 128 GB of RAM giving us close to a terabyte of memory.  The chassis also contains 4 HP chassis 10G capable switching modules and 2 Brocade FC modules for our storage interfaces.

For our storage needs we chose the HP 3PAR 7200 2N. The 3PAR is nothing short of amazing. With a configured total physical (raw) storage capability of right at 6.5 TB consisting of 24 300GB 15K SAS drives with redundancy and utilizing the thin provisioning feature built in to the 3PAR software suite, we are able to present 16 TB of usable storage to our vSphere 5.x environment. This proved to be an excellent choice. The performance is stellar even under extreme loads. The configuration, management and monitoring software is first rate.

Added into the mix is an HP DL360 tasked with hosting, with VMware ESXi 5.x, a vApp version of VMware’s vCenter Server, a VM with a dedicated instance of 2008 R2 for Veeam One Monitoring software, the 3PAR service provider vApp and one more Windows VM to house the 3PAR management suite.

For battery backup duty, we tagged two of HP’s very capable R5500 UPSs for the heavy lifting and a single APC Smart-UPS 1500 for the networking gear.

With everything loaded up we have a total of 30u worth of space used in our custom 36u travel rack. All things considered, that’s a lot of compute in a relatively small package.

Review: Compellent SC4020 or Baby Compellent

Dell Compellent SC4020 (Baby Compellent)/Compellent Enterprise Manager Pre-release Evaluation

The Compellent SC4020 is Dell’s answer to small footprint high performance enterprise SAN solutions being offered by HP (3PAR), IBM (V Series), NetApp (E and EF Series) and a number of specialty storage vendors like Violin (6000 Series) as well as multinationals like Fugitsu with their Eternus Series.

Dell bought Compellent back in 2011 to round out their storage offerings in the enterprise level SAN market. In the years since a considerable amount of work has been done at the firmware optimization level as well as management software but little in the way of physical changes related to power or footprint optimization.  The SC4020 is a near top to bottom redesign that applies all the lessons learned on the firmware/software front and manages to actually meet or even beat the size footprint of HPs excellent 3PAR 7200 by eliminating the Service Processor server requirement.

Typically I go through the process of configuring any device I test from the shipping box out. In this case Dell dispatched a storage engineer to set us up.

While I appreciate the fact that Dell wants to ensure that the setup goes smoothly and that the configuration is done properly for a good testing environment I’m forced to put that on the negative side of the leger. The engineer was clearly competent, I had actually met him on a previous installation of a full sized Compellent for another demonstration, so his comfort level with the hardware is obviously high. Bottom line was that the installation took almost three hours. By way of comparison, the very first time our company had ever attempted a configuration on a 3PAR, I was box to operational in three hours. Subsequent installations typically take 30-40 minutes. In this case, the device was mounted, cabled, powered and networked before the engineer stepped through the door. In addition, he had to make no fewer than 4 calls in to his engineering support for various configuration and software issues. In the end, I don’t feel confident that I could provision the device without assistance even after watching it be done by a pro. That does not bode well for field installation.

So what we have here is a Fibre fabric connected SAN with 18 - 300 GB drives. 11 - 15K SAS SFF and 6 - 10K SAS SFF drives in a 2 u chassis. The chassis has redundant power supplies and redundant controllers offering an array of connection options including 10 Gb iSCSI ports and 4 x 6 GBps SAS ports for expansion in addition to the 8 (4 per controller) 8 Gbps, FC ports. One thing I found interesting about the “best practice” cabling direction is that in addition to the back plane connectivity between the controllers, they suggest utilizing 2 of the 6 GB SAS ports for a redundant interconnect. I was told that it will work without that connection but it’s not recommended.

Just so we get this straight right off the bat...

Just to start things right here, my reviews will have applicability to a wide range of tech folks but I focus on use cases that directly relate to my business' needs and requirements. I try to cover all the features and functionally test all the bells and whistles but I concentrate on those things that relate to what my company does every day.

Having said that, if you or you organization are in the market for anything I review here, you will likely get some good insight into the product or service. I also attend several trade shows every year related to casino gaming and technology like G2E and VMworld. I'll post on all that stuff as well.