Florida Municipal Power Agency is using HP Lefthand VMware SAN/iQ. The INI Group's Tony Asaro interviewed Carter Manucy, manager of IT. This is how Carter describes his role:

“I’m the manager of IT. I've been with FMPA (Florida Municipal Power Agency) for about 14 years now and although I head up the IT group, it's very much a working role. I do a lot of the analysis and development, storage, networking, process and development and future discussions. A lot of my responsibilities lie in the development and in the planning phases of a lot of network storage virtualization so anytime we have a new project coming in or a new task or something to complete, it usually ends up in my plate for design and then further out for actual deployment. It usually ends up being other people.”

The following is an overview of Florida Municipal Power Agency's IT environment:

• Seventy employees
• Number of servers are in the low one hundreds (physical and virtual) 
• Linux and Windows
• VMware 4 and 3.5
• Two hundred terabytes storage

Listen to individual answers by clicking on the following questions:

1. Why did you initially decide to implement VMware?
   
2. What about LeftHand? You're using that as your storage. What drove you down the Lefthand path?
   
3. How has the reliability of your iSCSI been?
4. What about performance?
   
5. And you talk about reliability as well. I believe that you have implemented a disaster recovery scenario with Lefthand as well?
6. In a sense, you're really stretching the cluster. You're not actually doing replication remotely, it's really the data that lives in both places as part of the architecture.
   
7. Most companies that I talk to when they deal with DR scenarios, it's extremely difficult and cumbersome and you're making it sound like that the way you're doing it is pretty easy.
   
8. It sounds to me as if over the last few years, you guys have really reinvented your data center environment by using VMware to do.....
   
9. Can you give some insights to IT professionals that are looking at this solution that would be helpful to them?
10. Doesn't really the job of IT then change over time; that it becomes less about solving problems when things break versus creating an environment that can accelerate the business?
11. What are the next steps using HP Lefthand?
12. Would you recommend HP Lefthand to other IT professionals and can you tell us why?
    

For more information on HP Lefthand, go to www.lefthandnetworks.com