seeding EQL replication

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/storage/f/4466/t/19444631.aspx

Yes, this is one way you can do the initial transfer to the DR group.

You also may want to read up on the Manual Transfer Utility (MTU), the download is located on the same page as the Firmware Version you have installed on your arrays (on the FW download page, look for the section titled "EqualLogic Tools Compatibiltiy).

In a nut shell, after MTU is installed, then using the same system, login to the Group Admin GUI, and in the Tools Menu (lower left), select "Manual Transfer utility"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robenderle/2012/04/16/michael-dell-on-dells-present-and-future-success/

Using EqualLogic as an example we were able to grow their 3,000 customers to over 50,000. This established a process where we start with a successful company and rather than the more typical process that other firms use of blowing the acquisition up in order to integrate it in existing legacy lines we attach the company to Dell resources which act like a huge business booster. The end result is our acquisitions increase in value dramatically while other approaches generally have the opposite effect.

HP P4000: Management Group Maintenance Mode, Volumes Not Available, and Cache Status Corrupt

How to resolve the problem is in the link below:

Due to electrical maintenance work, a 2 node P4000 SAN cluster with failover manager, needed to be completely powered down, and this was done in the correct order – hosts accessing the SAN powered down first, then the SAN was shut down via the “Shut Down Management Group...” option in the HP StorageWorks P4000 Centralized Management Console (CMC).

Something went wrong when the SAN was powered back up, and the result was:

i: The Management Group was operating in Maintenance Mode.

ii: All the volumes (including the Network RAID tolerant volumes) had a status of 'Not Available'.

iii: One of the Storage Systems had a status of Failed

http://cosonok.blogspot.com/2012/04/hp-p4000-management-group-maintenance.html

The questions continue, EqualLogic versus Lefthand HP P4500

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/396380?tstart=0

I can't comment on the Lefthand or cross-site functionality of either.  What I can say is that I managed a 100TB EMC Unified shop and the 30TB Equalogic we used for iSCSI was 100x more reliable and easier to work with.  Ultimately, we used the Equalogic whenever we had the opportunity, and the EMC's sat there doing nothing.

Equalogic is a solid SMB platform.

With the lefthand there are 2 types of protection going on. The first is the Raid level inside a single node (this is standard raid accross the disks in that node, usually Raid1 or Raid5)

When you add a second node on the same site, you can setup network raid. this mirrors a lun to both nodes, so if a Node fails, the lun can continue to be presented to the servers.

when you add the remote site nodes into the network raid, that lun is also mirrored to the remote site nodes, so you effectively end up with 4 copies of the data.

For the EQL box, whilst there is only 1 node each site, those node are more resilient at the hardware level. the disks in the node will be raided, and their are 2 physical controllers in each node. If a controller fails the node will switch to the other one.

If you add a second node on the local site with EqualLogic, and add it to the Group all luns are stripped between the 2 nodes, increasing performance.