Peer Integration
Comprehensive Toolkit for Windows Environments
All Dell EqualLogic PS Series arrays come with a comprehensive software toolkit to facilitate the deployment, ongoing management, and protection of EqualLogic SANs in your Microsoft Windows environments. As a Microsoft Simple SAN designated solution, the PS Series is proven, interoperable, and easy to setup and manage for Windows platforms.
With the PS Series Remote Setup Wizard, traditionally tedious setup and maintenance tasks are simplified using an intuitive, step-by-step user interface. An EqualLogic SAN can be setup and fully operational in minutes right of the box – not in hours or days like other SAN products. Configuration of multi-path I/O between your Windows servers and an EqualLogic SAN – a multi-step operation with the basic Microsoft iSCSI driver – is vastly simplified with our wizard. This results in significant time savings and the assurance that MPIO has been configured properly to maximize the availability and performance of your deployment. For future upgrades, the Remote Setup Wizard helps you quickly and easily add PS Series arrays for online scale-out of storage capacity and linear, incremental performance improvement.
PS Series Auto-Snapshot Manager is a feature-rich application for protecting and recovering Windows data, including NTFS file system and SQL Server deployments. The Auto-Snapshot Manager, included with all PS Series arrays, allows administrators to create “clean” NTFS file system and SQL Server database snapshots, local database volume clones, and remote database replicas. This application is integrated with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to provide hardware-based snapshots with full or differential copies. A complete scheduler is included with E-mail notification options to simplify maintenance operations.
In the event that recovery of an NTFS file system or SQL Server database is necessary, Auto-Snapshot Manager provides several quick restore options to maximize the availability of your critical file data and SQL applications. A file system or database can be quickly restored with a complete known point-in-time copy from a full snapshot. Using log file snapshots, a database can be restored to a more granular point in time. In addition, a snapshot can be restored to an EqualLogic SAN on a different remote or local server for new application usage or for test and development.
Auto-Snapshot Manager also provides simple snapshot integration with advanced third party backup applications by supporting VSS and Virtual Disk Service (VDS) interfaces. This capability eliminates the extensive system configuration and scripting that other systems require for snapshot-based backups.
Collectively, these tools make it easier to bring shared storage to your Windows applications and eliminate the worries of time-consuming storage management – freeing up more time to manage your business applications.