What does InfoWorld think

I just thought these posts were interesting. Written by two different authors, the first on EqualLogic (In 2007) scored


Article here http://www.infoworld.com/t/storage/equallogics-iscsi-san-hits-storage-management-high-notes-567?page=0,1
The author highlights the speed of the box some of the speed coming from the high performance SAS drives and the rest coming from the 'enormous 2GB battery-backed cache'

Also highlights the extreme ease of use.

The other article (written in 2007) scored

Article is here http://www.infoworld.com/t/hardware/lefthand-boosts-its-saniq-563

Author points out that lefthand is a clustered storage that can run proprietary hardware as well as HP servers (I'm pretty sure other servers as well)

Flexibility jumped as a clear differentiator.

LeftHands thin provisioning of snapshots (only copying the delta)

Size of company comparison and other triva facts

Lefthand was founded in 1999 and had 200 some employees located in bolder CO, before it was acquired by HP on December 1,2008 for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments. It had 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company had more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.

Equallogic on the other company was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire. Had 384 employees and as of January 25, 2008, EqualLogic, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Dell Inc. it was purchased for 1.4 billion.

This post questions how many customers lefthand really had

http://thesantechnologist.com/?p=41

But if you were to base your decision on purchase price alone, Equallogic was valued much higher than Lefthand. It makes you wonder....

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)