The virtualization connection

DeltaValve's Brown, who isn't afraid of getting under the hood, quickly saw the potential of his new SAN. "I moved everything -- SQL Server, Navision, SharePoint, Exchange Server, and an Oracle database that runs our PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) System -- onto them," he says.

Brown's willingness to tinker also took him deep into the world of virtualization. "About three months after we got the SAN running, I brought VMware into the mix. Virtual storage from the SAN and server virtualization from VMware go hand in hand."

Brown has two host VMware servers (both homegrown, Quad AMD Opteron-powered boxes) and runs eight virtual servers on each. "The beauty," he says, "is that if one host goes down, we can use the other host to mount the same volume and be up in a matter of minutes."

Thane Morgan, director of information technology for the town of Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis, had virtualization on his mind from the start. He also looked at LeftHand but did not like the way that software vendor made the hardware decision for you. "Being dependent on their [LeftHand's] control of hardware drives my cost up," he says.