I don't have any other brand/type of SAN to compare it against, and
haven't done any performance testing, but they've been rock solid, the
customer service has been prompt and knowledgeable and the performance
hasn't disappointed us, so yes, quite happy.

WRT to rock solid, the first pair were Dell 2950s (once HP bought the
company, that of course changed.) One of them last year developed a
bad stick of RAM. I called, they got us a stick the next day, I downed
the affected unit and replaced the stick. There was no slowdown or
hiccup of any kind, and as soon as I brought the unit back up, it
started replicating changes immediately, and was done within about an
hour.

WRT to customer service, I called late in the afternoon on the above
problem, was greeted by a non-accented support tech at HP who handled
all of the details with Dell for getting us the right stick, and
Things Just Happened, the way I needed them to happen.

Also WRT to rock solid, I installed the third unit in the middle of
the day with a support rep on the line, just for handholding. The
original units' software was too old to accommodate the new unit, so I
had to upgrade them. That was a piece of cake - do one, let it reboot
and sync with the new one, then do the other and let it reboot and
sync with the new one. All during the business day. Never missed a
beat.

So, I'm really enamored with the replication that happens between N
number of units - when we bought the initial pair, we selected two-way
replication, and maintained that choice when we added a third unit.
Just keep adding units as needed (and probably decommissioning
obsolete units, but we haven't quite reached that point yet.)

The kinda cool thing is that you can purchase the software (VSA)
separately, and install it on your own equipment. I don't know how
that's licensed, but I really like the idea a lot.

Our two initial units were 4tb raw each, which formatted out to around
3.7tb once paired. The new unit was 6tb raw, which stranded about 2tb
of raw disk space - but we got the 4tb raw out of it. It was the cheap
way to go, and I recommended against it, because of the loss of space,
but it's worked out OK for now.

I have yet to investigate whether adding a fourth unit will allow me
to redo the space and regain the stranded disk, but I can query on
that later, when it's time to upgrade again - which is not very long
from now.

Kurt

On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 15:48, Ryan Finnesey
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Are you happy with Lefthand SAN?
>
> Cheers
> Ryan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Buff [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2011 8:03 PM
> To: NT System Admin Issues
> Subject: Re: Opinion on iSCSI switch to use for Equalogic SAN
>
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 12:45, Ben N <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I was thinking of getting a pair of the PowerConnect 7024 switches for
>> our SAN.
>> Has anyone had any good or bad experience with a setup like this? It
>> will only be used for iSCSI. I could go the Juniper or Cicso route,
>> but don't need all those extra features or cost.
>> -Ben
>
> When I got my pair of Lefthands, I bought a pair of HP 2810-24G gigabit 
> switches. I've been very happy with them.
>
> Kurt
>
> ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ 
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