The HP Proliant G7s are due out soon but we've heard nothing about it. Our own Nostradamus, Marquis Calmes, has a bold (and completely speculative) prediction. The G7s will include integrated battery backup, ala Google's custom built systems. Why? Who needs reasons when making BOLD PREDICTIONS! Now our first introduction to the G7s is next week and will be covered by our NDA. Therefore this is the last you'll hear from us on this topic for a little while.

Also, our favorite SAN, the HP Lefthand, is losing its cool moniker. Now known as the HP Storageworks P4000 G2 (blah!) it includes a number of new features. Improved capacity efficiency, application integrated snapshots and a Unified NAS Gateway sound pretty cool. I'll break these down after hands-on training next week.

We've been installing these ProLiant G6s for a while now and were really impressed with the noise reduction on the 1 Us. One of our technicians, Nikolai Wunderlin, had his camera with him on an install and captured a few minutes of the silence for you. Don't let the first shaky seconds deter you - he gets on a roll about 5 seconds into it! Thanks Nik!

VARs love selling maintenance contracts. They constitute about the only margin left on hardware. There can be very little cost to the VAR in service that maintenance contract. Why? Because they're usually a horrible deal for the client. Why spend $50k on a phone system and then spend $10k per year on a maintenance contract? Why not keep spare parts on hand for an extra $5k, one time expense? I rarely meet any client with any maintenance contract that doesn't complain about nickel and diming. Avoid this hassle by either not renewing maintenance contracts or by going with a lower end contract. If your systems are redundant, a lower end contract is an easy way to save thousands of dollars.

The one exception to this is for systems with non-standardized equipment. If your server rack is a mix of HP, Dell, IBMs purchased sporadically over the last 3 years, stocking parts may be difficult. Of course, since you're going to virtualize on standardized servers anyway this is a moot point.

When small and midsize businesses find the need to invest in a storage area network solution they are faced with lots of options.  The modular, clustered, iSCSI SAN products offered by EqualLogic (Dell) and LeftHand (HP) have become highly attractive solutions for organizations moving into virtualization that need robust solutions with integrated replication.  But, these are complicated solutions and gathering information to compare these offerings can be a challenge.

The Info Tech research group has posted a great PDF (registration required to view) comparing these two product lines and explaining what make clustered SANs different from the more traditional model.  For even more information, check out the blog equallogicversuslefthand.blogspot.com.