[geeks] Why did Auspex lose and Netapp win?

[velociraptor]

We had two at Cisco.  They worked reasonably well for their time, but
they were run off embedded Sparc 20 hardware and were ran a modified
SunOS 4.1.4, iirc, with all it's attendant limitations.  They were
huge behemoths, using full sized disks, and like EMC's approach were
intended to be black boxes.  They also used Micropolis as their disk
supplier for the full-sized disks, and got bitten very, very hard by
the 9gb disk failure fiasco that Micropolis had around 1996 or 1997.
Iirc, the disk model was 1991?  Our management team made them come in
and replace every single 1991 in them (likewise our Sun 3rd party
field service support vendor was required to do the same).

We also had NetApps, which were smaller, higher density, easier to
administer, and had a management team that was responsive to our
needs. We had a custom build of OnTap due to a ridiculous requirement
of our infra and NetApp was happy to give it to us.

=Nadine=

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:15 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
> On 5/22/2012 6:45 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote:
>> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 3:52 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>
wrote:
>>> Wondering if anyone can enlighten me on why Auspex failed and Netapp won
>>> in the market?
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspex ???
>
> I did not know it was that simple... I had bought a NS5000 or 7000 a
> number of years ago, but then had problems putting it into service due
> to power supply issues (I would have had to spring for a different kind
> of service at the panel in the office I was in, or, buy a 120-220V
> upconverter at a small loss of efficiency).
>
> --Patrick
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