An Information Security Place

So this post is not exactly about security, though it has ramifications in the security industry as well as virtually every other industry.  As you may know, Accuvant is a security consulting / reselling firm.  However, as the trend continues towards convergence of the network and security, we become more and more involved in infrastructure consulting and reselling.  We have a bunch of people who know how to design and implement infrastructure projects and include strong security principles along with the solution, so it actually works well for us.

Well, one of our clients in the Dallas area has used us for the past couple of years to help them build out their infrastructure as they expand.  We designed the phase 1 of the infrastructure, and now we are moving into phase 2.  Part of that phase 2 involves them installing a SAN and VMware ESX servers.  Good move on their part.  We don’t do the SAN and VMware stuff, so he brought in another consultant, namely Dell.  Our client is buying a Dell Equallogic iSCSI box and using Dell to build it and the VMware servers.

The first thing our client told us was that he wanted to connect the SAN and the ESX servers directly to the core since he had plenty of ports, there was redundancy built in there already, and he wouldn’t need to buy more switches.  He doesn’t have a huge environment, but we advised that if he was going to do that, it needed to be in a phased approach, and he needed to put additional switches into his access layer for the SAN and ESX servers when he starts approaching the next phase of the expansion.  He decided to go ahead with that since we made the suggestion, so he started looking at which switches to use.

He is an Extreme Networks shop, so we made a couple of suggestions for switches.  He went to his storage consultants at Dell, and they told him that Extreme was not certified with Equallogic and that he would need to buy Dell or Cisco switches.  Obviously that was throwing a monkey wrench in the plans.  We really didn’t want to throw other switches into this mix.  Should it work?  Yes.  But why tempt the switching gremlins?

So before we started heading down that path, I decided to do a little research.  I sat down in front of my laptop expecting a good 30 minutes or so trying to see if anyone out there had put Extreme in with Equallogic iSCSI.  Well, it took me about 2 minutes with this search to find these two articles:

http://www.equallogic.com/partners/view.aspx?id=332

http://www.equallogic.com/partners/view.aspx?id=290#e

So Equallogic does support Extreme??  Looks like they do when you see this line in the second article:

EqualLogic supports Extreme Networks’ switches.

Can’t get much more definitive than that!

So the point is that you should not always accept the word of an "expert".  it always pays off to do some research.  Yes, you should be able to use the experts advice in making decisions.  But backing that up with your own research often pays off.  Of course, if I’m the expert, then you can absolutely trust anything and everything I say as completely and totally factual.

Vet