So at the day job we’re looking at implementing a SAN along with moving server to something virtual (VMware, Virtual Iron or Xensource) . We like the offerings from LeftHand Networks for the SAN. It’s a software based SAN approach will allow us to grow as we need. We’ve got the quotes from them, but the execs are still leary about spending that much money. It’s a typical battle that everyone in IT fights, but we’re finally making progress.

Last weekend LeftHand released their SAN/iQ as a VMware appliance. This is very very awesome. This allows us to test the functionality of it on our network without getting the vendor in here with a SAN on loan that we end up buying because we’ve already started using it on our production network.

We’ve got an AIX server setup with our production data and have it connected via iSCSI to the appliances setup in a two node cluster. Testing so far has been really good over a 100mbit network. Speeds are similar to the SSA drives our production AIX server has. Will definitely update when we have tested it more.