Indenixs Reynolds says he faced the same situation with Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL)
blades. He received a cold call from a LeftHand Networks Inc. salesman. I had never heard of IP SAN and I never heard of LeftHand either, he says. "I wanted high availability and no planned downtime. I wanted to do things you associate with high-end SANS at a price that made sense for us.
Davies says Sawtel, which provides satellite bandwidth connectivity in all parts of the world, had to find a cheaper way to set up storage in order to keep its prices competitive. He says he installed Adaptec Inc. (Nasdaq: ADPT) iSCSI cards for about one-sixth the cost of Fibre Channel.
The three report their IP SANs were easy to set up and manage, and performance has been no problem, even with standard NIC cards instead of more expensive TCP offload engines (TOEs). [Ed. note: That might explain why vendors selling TOEs are struggling. See iReady to Go, Nvidia Buys iReady, and Trebia Croaks.]
I dont think it took twenty minutes to set up, Reynolds says. Performance has been above expectations. Davies adds: The biggest surprise is how well it fits our needs. Its easy to manage; you dont have to have special [Fibre Channel] skills.
Walters says he was leery at first. My background is in database performance tuning, so I was worried about performance. I spent two or three months testing it in my enterprise before rolling it out. Performance was more than adequate.
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