Wow - much has happened on this thread since my last post! Let me say first and foremost that LeftHand Networks' management, in my experience as an employee, has zero tolerance for unethical behavior. It should be noted that the battle for the storage dollar of customers, both large and small, is well underway. Those involved in the sales organizations on the front lines of this battle have seen customers make their buying decisions based on steak dinners rather than sound product comparisons or on contrived reliability and performance scenarios rather than real-world data. I believe that the heat of battle can cause lapses in judgment and that such lapses are not excusable, but can be understandable in the context of this hyper-competitve market.
If you distill the ESRP submissions from LeftHand Networks and Dell/EqualLogic, you see that 180 drives powered by LeftHand Networks' SAN/iQ 6.6 in April, 2007 were able to accommodate the performance requirement of 50,000 users while 192 drives powered by Dell/EqualLogic running V3.2 firmware were able to accommodate the performance requirement of 60,000 users in September, 2007. Remarkable numbers from both companies, especially given that many people are still brainwashed to believe that iSCSI can't deliver FC-class performance. Both companies offer a host of features in their respective SANs and LeftHand's ESRP submission happened to showcase a feature that Dell/EqualLogic does not have - synchronous replication. Of course, this has little to do with VMware. I think pasikarkkainen's point in posting the 60,000 user result was to suggest that volumes on EqualLogic arrays can span across more than a handful of PS-arrays. If you read the ESRP submission, you'll see that LUNs only span 48 disks (page 13 of their pdf). Perhaps all 12 PS-arrays were in the same Peer Group or whatever it is called, but the performance of any LUN is gated by the number of drives assigned to the LUN. Box-level redundancy remains a concern. No RAID6, no replication between boxes.
On the VMware performance front, note that the unofficial VMware storage performance thread (started by ChristianZ - http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745?tstart=0&start=0) shows performance results from a variety of vendors, including LeftHand Networks and EqualLogic product. The performance of the solutions from the two companies is ultimately quite close in terms of $/IOP - some of the results show LeftHand Networks to be faster, others showing EqualLogic to be faster. Since the April 2007 ESRP submission, LeftHand Networks has announced three new hardware platforms, a new version of SAN/iQ (20+ enhancements), a virtual SAN appliance (which was a finalist at VMworld), and added the Dell PowerEdge 2950 to the HCL for SAN/iQ.
Adehart / Tony - sorry to hear that your sales experience with LeftHand wasn't up to your expectations. It should be noted that we have thousands of customers using all of the features of our SAN in production on a daily basis. One quick technical note: the Centralized Management Console will indeed close if the module to which it is connected becomes unavailable on the network (like if you change its IP). I imagine that the web interface on a PS array or any other storage device will also "crash" if the device hosting the management interface becomes unavailable (or you change its IP address). It is a shame that your interactions in the field were with the newest members of our constantly growing team. As I understand it, some of your feedback has been acted upon internally and has resulted in changes to the training regimen for our new hires. Thank you for your feedback. I hope you will consider LeftHand Networks for your future storage needs.
Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays!
Stephan Stelter
LeftHand Networks
Message was edited by: sstelter - added link to performance thread
