Warning: Rant content

So the talk of Lefthand math ties nicely into my topic for today. And yes, I’m going to rant. A number of years ago, we bought a SAN solution from Lefthand networks. It performed well. We were able to house Exchange and some file server stuff on it and it was just fine. We started down the path of virtualizing servers. We bought three more of the modules. At that point, they had discontinued the 150 model that we were used to. We smarted a bit from that, since we had negotiated future pricing on those units but we went ahead and bought 3 160 models.

Recently at work, we’ve started a request for proposal (RFP) process to purchase new SAN storage space. There was something that struck me about one proposal from Lefthand Networks involving their NSM160 platform (which they weren’t pitching at this proposal). We have several NSM160’s in our datacenter and one stat that they threw out there was the max IOPS number: 30,000. I do realize that they have at some lab somewhere running the absolute perfect test they have achieved this speed.