Funny ways to explain things…

Since I do tech support, installation, and some pre-sales where I currently work I have to come up with interesting ways to explain different aspects of technology in non-technical terms. Most of these revolve around Dell/EqualLogic storage. They may help you they may not. You may even find them funny. If they’re helpful feel free to reuse them. If they aren’t helpful or funny please blame congress. 🙂

Storage Wars:

I was installing an EqualLogic array into an existing VMware environment. The client I was working with noticed that the guest OS reported 50GB in use and had a 100GB drive. VMware reported that the datastore was 90% used and was 120GB in size. And that the EqualLogic array was reporting that 60GB was in use on the volume. The client wanted to know why there was a discrepancy between each of them.

Here is how I explained it:

Think of the volume as the land one of those storage rental sites sits on. A datastore from VMware is like the building the storage units, it uses some space for the walls and floors and doors but the rest is nothing but empty space. Lets say the site has 120 storage units, and anyone can rent those. A VM using that datastore is like a tenet who can rent as many units as they want. Neither the Land owner or the manger of a storage rental site care if you store one box in your storage unit or fill it up to the brim, you just can’t spill into anyone else’s unit. So The guest VM only has 50GB of stuff in its storage locker. The ESXi host says the unit is 100GB because its can’t use any of the leftover space in the unit. And the EqualLogic array only knows that the total amount of stuff is 60GB (You have to count the walls and floors plus all the rest of the stuff the VM stored).

That’s how I explain the space differences using non-technical terms. I just rent them a storage unit. 🙂

Yay! I peed in the pool:

I was working on a technical problem with an EqualLogic group. We had been discussing splitting the pool so that each array was in its own pool. Someone said that splitting the pool would not impact performance of the volumes that were spanned across three arrays. Here is how I explained it:

Lets say I have a 60 Gallon fish tank that has a bunch of water and fish in it. How much of the water can the fish swim in currently. Answer is of course 60 gallons. Now lets say I split the tank up in thirds how much water can the fish swim in now? Only about 20 gallons. If you split up the EqualLogic Pool the volumes will only have a third of the resources to use instead of everything in the pool.

That’s a simple way to explain how pools work to bring resources together.

I’ll add some more to this post later on.