On Mar 3, 2009, at 1:59 PM, Gary Studwell wrote: > Check out Lefthand Networks - although they were purchased by HP > last year, they > are still around.
We recently went through a reevaluation of our SAN architecture (which was LeftHand SATA units). We looked at the NetApp offerings as well as the SAS offerings from LeftHand, and at the end of the day, the LeftHand offerings were still better bang for the buck (we felt) than NetApp - at least for our environment. The acquisition by HP both helps and hinders the LeftHand line. It helps it in that the previous support model was just completely broken. They were a "software company" who in the middle of a support ticket would be like "ok, that's a firmware problem, let's get $HARDWARE_VENDOR involved," which invariably led to finger-pointing and such. Now, acquired by HP, one can expect it to become a unified "HP solution" with other vendors out of the picture. On the flip side, one can expect that their support for alternate hardware configurations - beyond the plug-n-play "appliances" based on HP equipment they will sell - will be minimal if not vanish completely. It seems unlikely that HP/LeftHand would say "yes, feel free to run this on your Dell PowerEdge", so the hardware choices diminish some. Overall, though? Decent storage and performance at a decent price, and fairly expandable. Other than some bottlenecking because of architectural/cost decisions (SATA over SAS) initially, we've been quite happy with the hardware itself. Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
