Seeking Dell Equallogic on Procurve experiences

[Bruce Campbell_3]

We are deploying a pair of Dell Equallogic
iSCSI SAN devices in our machine room,
which uses Procurve 8212zl switches.

I've reviewed the Equallogic network requirements:

http://www.equallogic.com/uploadedfiles/Resources/Tech_Reports/tr-network-guidelines-TR1017.pdf

which recommends 802.3x flow control and
jumbo frames, and the 8212zl does that,
so I am not expecting any problems. But
our SAN project manager is nervous because
someone at Dell told him to use Cisco switches. I explained why Dell might say
such a thing, and that we need technical
reasons, and also said I'd look for Procurve/Equallogic experience out there.

Any good/bad experience or advice ?

Thanks

[Magnus Tengmo]

I was at the same situation 2,5 years ago. We wanted to use a pair of 2900-24 for iSCSI, but at the momement, jumboframes and flowcontrol was not possible to use at the same time. I added a support request on that, and I think it´s solved on later firmware on 2900.

We use Cisco 3750G for EQL and Powerconnect M6220 for blades. If I understand the different on Cisco/Dell is that Cisco use 512Kb buffers / per, but Dell only 256Kb buffers. Not sure about Procurve.

But I think you should physical isolate the storage network with own switches and no spanningtree.

Good luck, Magnus

[Bruce Campbell_3]

The 8212zl default per port queue buffer
size is 194KB, but it can be changed to
480KB or 618KB by changing from 8 QoS
queues to 4 or 2.

We've since back from Dell that they
have customers using Equallogic on
Procurve successfully, but it isn't
officially supported.