Dell Equallogic or HP Lefthand, Honest Opnions

[superikey]

I have spent the last month going back and forth reviewing both Equallogic and LeftHand SAN Solutions for a client. They both seem like excellent products, which have different approaches.

The issue which makes it really difficult to see clearly is they bash each other as being inferior and its also very difficult to get honesty out of salespeople as to which product is really better. The Dell Equallogic reps have been doing a batter job of bashing HP LeftHand, but I dont feel that they are being fair.

Is it better to have a purpose built box like the Equallogic, or better to have something built on open scapable X86 Architecture like the the LeftHand? When it comes to the Euqallogic solution, there is no redundancy between units, so if we span volumes, this seems like a risk, even though the boxes themselves are fully redundant within.

Which solution really performs better, or do they both perform alike?

And is it really practical to go all SATA v.s SAS for an environment with 150 Users, 12 ESX Guests (3 Hosts), SQL and Exchange?

Any opinions, thoughts, real life experiences and comments would be greatly appreciated.



Isaac Braca
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[cajuntank]

Can't give you any real life opinions yet on the two, but I am about to get a HP Lefthand SAN node installed in a few days, so I can pass on what I think about that product after that. Now from a SATA vs SAS standpoint and using SAN(s) in general with SQL and Exchange, I can offer you several opinions. I use SAS for my heavier utilized processes due to faster spindle speeds. SATA used more for ancillary services I have such as backup storage, imaging storage, and systems deployment. SQL is fine on the SAN and again, depending on how much it's hit, then the choice of SAS or SATA is your call. Exchange on the other hand, is more recommended on DAS (direct attached storage) instead of on a SAN. Not that you can't have it there, but even under Microsoft's new statements about Exchange 2010 coming out later this year, they mention about not putting it on a SAN and having it DAS.

Based on what I understand from Lefthand, the more storage nodes you implement, then the faster the over SAN becomes. So going all SATA or all SAS or having a hybrid of the two (of course I wouldn't create an array that overlapped between the two), is your call based on your 150 people.

I use some VMWare and some Hyper-V, but I don't personally VM my domain controllers, SQL, and Exchange.

 

[cajuntank]

Ok... finished with my install and it went very easy. The Lefthand product is pretty straight forward and easy to manage I can say so far. I questioned the installer I had helping me about his opinion on this product and it's competing products out there in the market. The engineer was a retired employee from HP that said he did a lot of testing of theirs as well as other manufacturer's products. He now does contracting to make extra money and have something to do and said out of all the products he's seen, the Lefthand impressed him the most mainly due to the performance getting better adding nodes to the SAN and ease of operation. Of course, I'm taking him at his word only and don't know the guy. He might have been talking highly of it to make me feel good. I did not buy the unit from him, he is just the contractor Lefthand chose to use to install mine.

 

[bilbus]

I also like to keep SAS drives for anything like SQL or Exchange.

Most likely your exchange/sql DBs are small enough that space is less of an issue then preformence.

My fileservers are generaly SATA, while apps run on SAS. Hope that helps

It's the idea behind tiered storage.

How much space do you need?

 

[xmsre]

Exchange - Depends on the version. 2003-SAS, 2007-SAS or SATA depending on if you're using cached or non-cached clients.

SQL - SAS

ESX - SAS


The problem with lefthand is usable capacity. If you use network RAID with only 2 nodes, then your usable drops to something like 35%. On the Equalogic, to support ESX, Exchange, and SQL, you'll likely go RAID10. In that case, usable CAPACITY is about 50%. In either case, given the workloads, I wouldn't use RAID5. RAID 5 won't be able to provide the required write performance.

 

[sgtshot]

I will preface this by saying I compete with both products, and thoroughly enjoy beating the pants off of both of them, on price, performance and features.


They both make fine products, and I am sure you will be fine. I have never agreed that putting two controllers in one box, gives you high availability, so lefthand scores higher in that market.

The SAS/SATA debate is a fun one, I have sold 100's of our iSCSI SAN's and people always ask if they need SAS. The answer is most of the time, SMB's do not need the SAS drives because of the huge cache available with SATA II. The environment where SAS disks do make a difference are where there are going to be 1000's of truly random hits to the data, Like VDI.

We have had no problems with our iSCSI SAN in VMware, Exchange, SQL or Oracle environments. (SATA II and SAS)

The trick is to make sure the person helping you is looking out for your best interests, and not just lining his pocket.