Gear Lust: Equallogic PS6500E

I have to admit, being back in the IT world has been better than I’d feared. Working for a big company (>100 employees) for the first time has also been good. Am I finally seeing the light? Who knows. But for now, this gig is good.

Recently I built a FreeNAS box to refresh my knowledge on BSD, and for a place to store all those legally obtained “large multimedia files” which have been clogging up my POS HP desktop. After figuring out how many more of these files I could store before I would need to expand the box, I started dreaming. I remembered a company called Equallogic that one of my former employers was big on.

Who are Equallogic and what do they do? Well, unfortunately they got swallowed up by Dell a few years ago, so effectively they are Dell. As for what they do, they make SAN appliances – Storage Area Network boxes. Basically, really smart, really fast special-purpose computers with a whole bunch of hard drives to store lots of stuff, keep it safe, and serve it out as fast as possible.

I had a look at the current offerings from Equallogic, and one box in particular stopped me dead in my (virtual) tracks. It’s got the catchy name of PS6500E. Luckily what’s inside is more interesting. How about 48 1 terabyte hard drives? Mmmmm… the possibilities….

Dell Equallogic PS6500E 48TB

Is this something you could possibly justify as a “step up” from a FreeNAS server at home? No. But it’s fun to dream. What’s the damage on one of these bad boys? Oh, about $100k. Just imagine this box with 2TB drives!!

Thanks to Tony Gonzales at Federal Appliance for giving me the lowdown on this bad boy.