Dell has just announced the availability of Equallogic PS6500ES and PS6510ES Arrays coming in fall 2012. Personally, I think this product fills the gap between the high end (XS series) and the low end (E series) and it’s probably going to be one of the best selling SMB iSCSI in coming years.

The reason is quite simple as most of the small to medium virtualized environment hardly have any continuous high IOPS pattern over time, and most of them requires very large amount of data capacity. The new Equallogic PS65×0ES series is exactly designed for this purpose. Try to imagine 48 Spindles 7200RPM 2TB NL SAS with SSD Caching indeed is very impressive.

The only concern I have is the infamous constant failed 7200RPM NL SAS drives issue occur since Firmware 4.x time, it’s been kept reporting the same issue even till EQL Firmware 5.2.x. IMOP I think it’s not related to software (ie, firmware) but most likely relates to hardware side, as underneath it’s still basically a SATA with SAS conversion connector, so they are prompt to have much higher failure rate than SAS. Imagine the time to rebuild a RAID50 or/and the probability having the 2nd disk failed is equally NOT impressive at all, so this may definitely hold off the purchase decision if your application is mission critical.

Finally, Equallogic has also announced the followings coming in fall 2012.

- Host Integration Tools (HIT) for VMware 3.5
- Host Integration Tools (HIT) for Microsoft 4.5
- SAN Headquarters (SANHQ) 2.5