by Joe Gleinser
30. October 2009 20:22
The first part of this comparison generated some heated interest in the blogosphere. It earned a response on Dell's Equallogic Blog as well as a couple of well composed comments from both HP and Dell. Dylan Locsin from Dell thought that a few of my points were inaccurate and he even insinuates that I may be misrepresenting myself. I'll respond to his points here:
1) Clustering: His point that my calling Equallogic "clustered" is inaccurate is completely correct. I should have call it "distributed." Equallogic does not offer true clustering across SANs. They don't offer a comparable feature to the Lefthand's Network RAID functionality which allows striping across SANs. Equallogic cannot pool IO resources as it scales.
2) Groups: Dylan interpreted my argument with Equallogic that "Data cannot span more than these two SANs" as a replication argument. It wasn't. With HP Lefthand SANs I can add performance and capacity with each node up to 16 nodes (and even beyond). This avoids silos of performance and storage. I did fail to point out that I was considering the PS4000 series which is the most commonly encountered Equallogic SAN considered device by my clients. The PS6000 series improves this situation.
Dylan wondered why I didn't offer a disclaimer that I sold HP Lefthand. If he scrolls down a bit he'll notice the disclaimer. I also prominently place the Lefthand SANs on my website. GCS does sell Dell servers, desktops and notebooks. We support MD3000i and Equallogic SANs from Dell. I think Equallogic is a fine product. However I firmly believe the HP Lefthand SAN offers the best value for my clients in the SMB market. That said, Dylan, I'm not opposed to also offering Equallogic to my clients that bleed blue. There are many of those, especially in Austin. I don't mean to insinuate that Equallogic is bad product. I've seen clients succeed with both options.