ESXi / ESX & Left Hand

[mattx]

Anyone using HP's Left Hand with ESX or ESXi ?
If so, comments, advice, what do you think ?

[apaton]

Saw the product for first time in at VMWARE Europe (NICE) 2006. Spoke to Dr Dave, a real evangelist of the product. I did a load with the Lefthand product before HP got their hand on it, even passed the Certified Lefthand Networks SANiQ course/exam.

Did like the product,
Simple GUI
Modular build,
Intergeneration with windows
VMWARE SRM support
Thin provision
VSA appliance


Negatives,
Because of network RAID you could only build a single cluster of either SAS or SATA (not mixed)
Snapshot, performance hit at over 6 snapshot on a volume.
Lost a few sales to Netapp, always pointed out they did iSCSI and CIFS, NFS and .....

These days I would look at Sun SS7000 range of storage or for a pure iSCSI box, Dell Equallogic.

Andy
BTW - My experience was with SANiQ 6 & 7.

[mattx]

Thanks for that - was not aware of the SAS / SATA restrictions.
Also looking at SANmedody...

[Duke]

+1 on the Sun S7000 range. Fully VMware certified to my knowledge and they run great with NFS (or iSCSI if you prefer). No licensing costs which is a huge plus over NetApp. Check out the 31-page thread over in the hardware forums, or give me a shout if you want to know anything about our S7410 that I'm planning to use with ESX next summer.

Chris

[apaton]

Sun S7000 range. Fully VMware certified to my knowledge

Yep fully qualified for VMWARE Vi3 3.5 and vSphere (iSCSI and NFS)