LeftHand UI, take 2

As featured on WindowsITPro

http://windowsitpro.com/Windows/article/articleid/102478/hp-lefthand-p4300-48tb-sas-starter-san-solution.html

His take on the UI

The SAN/iQ software really sets this product in a class by itself and is the easiest SAN management software I've ever used. You don't need to be a storage expert or have to look up confusing storage terms like LUN Masking to configure the SAN. Instead, you use a series of easy-to-use wizards to perform the initial setup and configuration. You can rerun the wizards at any time.

That is the sort of UI I am looking for! Someone should get him an EqualLogic box and see which he likes better :)

He actually attached a rare screen shot of the SAN/iQ software :)

His only complaint

The only problem I ran into was that occasionally the console wouldn't start and I needed to terminate the javaw.exe process in Task Manager before restarting the console.

First up Equallogic UI Versus Lefthand UI

The first thing that I noticed is that it is very difficult to find examples of the SAN/iQ UI. On the other hand Equallogic screenshots are all over the place. I stole this equallogic pic from here
http://www.derekschwab.com/2008/08/equallogic-san-expansion.html


There is an image here

http://www.cupfighter.net/index.php/2009/06/dell-equallogic-improvements/
And here http://thelowedown.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/exchange-hosting-data-on-iscsi/
And here http://sysadmincookbok.blogspot.com/2008/12/virtualization-solution-using-dell_16.html
And youtube videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYm96gKOfOE
Now I realize that most of these are user generated web pages. But it is interesting to note that it seems to be a lot more difficult to find out what the UI of the LeftHand SAN will be.

So in the search to find out what the lefthand SAN will look like this is the first hit on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4BJtTZx8z4 I could not make this up if I tried, ok don't watch that it actually doesn't show the interface. That presentation puts me to sleep (not produced by lefthand to be fair) I wish both of these vendors had more information out for what their stuff looked like.

Ok, after some heavy googling I ran across some screen shots for the LeftHand SAN
(From the spiceworks user limey, go spiceworks!)
http://community.spiceworks.com/attachments/post/0000/4594/1-15-2009_14-49-36.png

Here is another http://www.eweek.com/images/slide/195931_5.jpg

I also found a couple of pics inside a book from here http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/docs/vmwdocs/srmbookchapter2-vsainstallandconfig.pdf


I hope that can sort of give you a taste of what the different UI's look like. Maybe some Equallogic or Lefthand people will reply with screenshots of common interface tasks. (To be fair I should probably download the LeftHand virtual machine and get some screen shots from it, maybe in a future post)