The Clariion systems do perform better than the NSMs, Pelot concedes, but he insists that LeftHand has made great performance improvements and is almost up to the level of the EMC equipment.
Although Pelot now says he trusts LeftHand's products completely, he has decided to maintain the separation of clinical and business data. He currently has 5 Tbytes of storage on six NSMs, and says he will soon be buying two more.
But LeftHand uses a proprietary Ethernet storage protocol, instead of the industry standard, iSCSI. That means customers must continue to buy their storage from LeftHand if they need to expand their SAN. Isn't Denver Health concerned about vendor lock-in? Pelot says he's not, since the system works -- and works well -- today: "This keeps me from having to invest in another technology that will cost me even more money."
Since installing the NSMs, the hospital has experienced one disk failure after one of the units was inadvertently unplugged, but Pelot says the incident only reinforced his belief in LeftHand. "It did exactly what it was supposed to do: It rebuilt itself," he says. "We never lost any data, although we did see some performance degradation... It was a hell of a test."
Eugénie Larson, Reporter, Byte and Switch
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