Integrating Blades Solutions with Dell EqualLogic SANs
There are many ways that blade enclosures can be attached to a Dell EqualLogic SAN. This paper reviews three ways, but depending on the blade enclosure design features there may be other options. Each of the three architecture strategies presented here provides different trade-offs in cost, complexity and scalability.
The bottom line in designing a blade integration plan for an EqualLogic SAN revolves around a few criteria. The solution should provide full redundancy, it should provide enough inter-switch bandwidth to support not only host to SAN traffic, but also support inter-array management and load balancing, and it should provide enough I/O and minimal latency between the host and storage arrays to meet the requirements of the host applications that are attached.