You saw the announcement. It’s a great Starter SAN at a great price. A few people in the blogging community have interpreted that this announcement somehow relates to LeftHand only shipping on HP hardware from here on out. I don’t see that information in the release, so I figured I would set the record straight.
LeftHand’s software is hardware agnostic. Case in point, our Virtual SAN Appliance that can turn any storage server hardware in to a distributed, scale-out SAN, and it is not going away. So this pretty much puts a bullet in that theory.
A second point made in the blogging community is that we are moving away from a software only model. We have been moving away from a software-only approach for some time. We quickly learned from our customers that it is easier to buy storage as an integrated storage system. Our software is still supported on other platforms and going forward, we will ship on HP. HP is the leader in servers for a reason, so why not ship on the best, most cost effective storage server available in the market. Currently, there is nothing preventing a customer from incorporating an HP-based LeftHand storage system with their LeftHand/Dell or LeftHand/IBM SAN, they all work seamlessly together. Or if a customer chooses to turn those Dell or IBM servers in their branch offices into a shared SAN and automatically replicate the data back to a LeftHand SAN at head quarters – no problem. Of course if I had a chance to install HP blade servers in my remote offices in place of those dusty old Dell or IBM servers, I most certainly would.
So go ahead and run LeftHand on any hardware, including blade servers. The options are limitless. You can have scalable SAN storage with the VSA or LeftHand storage systems; it’s really up to you.
-John
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