[rescue] RE: somewhat OT: secondary market storage?

[Chris Byrne]

I used to work for a storage company. We had Hitachi and EMC online, ADIC
libraries, and we had test Shark boxes, Auspex, NTAP, and a few other
solutions. Here's what I found generally

EMC: Their technology is crap, their reliability blows chunks by today's
standards, their tech support is horrible, and they want to control the box
completely. Every time you want to make a change they want to do it for you,
or you get no tech support. Their sales staff are the biggest load of
unscrupulous scumbags I've ever seen. They will literally do anything to get
a sale. I personally and directly know of one sale that involved the hiring
of prostitutes. Once they sell you THEY OWN YOUR ASS. or at least that's how
they see it. VERY VERY expensive and a poor value for money

Can ya tell I don't like EMC maybe, just a little bit.

Hitachi: Their performance and technology are great, but their marketing and
sales are very weak. Their tech support can be great can be shit depending
on who you get and where. Their pro serv is very good. Their field service
is OK. Their quality is usually very good but they have had a few drive
failure issues over the last few years. They also want to control the box,
but they are a little less anal about it. Very expensive, but worth it

NetApp: Sales force with half a clue. Not too bad software wise especially
for their NAS solution but their hardware isn't the greatest in comparison
to say HDS. Good professional services but poor field service and tech
support Expensive, but a good value

Auspex: The storage company I worked for was full of ex auspex employees.
Any time someone even suggested using an Auspex product they either laughed
or got angry. I haven't used them personally but from what I've heard from
the people that used to make service and sell them I wouldn't touch with a
ten foot pole. Expensive and a shit value

MTI: Good product. Not the highest performance out there, somewhere in the
middle of the pack but highly modular and very customisable. Not great for
very large transactions, very good for large numbers of small transactions.
Good tech support but mediocre field service. Sales force is VERY spotty.
They let go most of their southern and midwestern US sales people wholesale
last year. Their European sales staff is great. Professional service people
are good at storage but not very good with systems and clueless about
security.  Relatively low cost per meg, and a good value for money

IBM: The large shark boxes are somewhere near the EMC and HDS for
performance depending on model and specs. The smaller ones are shit, and way
overpriced to boot. They have generally proven reliable. IBM global service
can be some of the best in the world both for tech support and field
service, and their pro serve can be excellent. Sometimes you get a major dud
though so be careful. Their sales staff are generally very competitive and
very aggressive. They also tend to be business only and have a tech team as
their backup (often subcontractors not IBM employees. They are very willing
to take a big profit hit to win business over EMC or Hitachi. Very
expensive, but not a great value for money

>From my standpoint if you need VERY high performance with large transactions
then Hitachi is the way to go. Hitachi is also rebadged/branded and sold by
HP and Sun. They are very expensive without a doubt starting at the 500K
mark and going up to the 5 Mil range depending on the setup, but they are
also Super fast and can scale into the high multiterr range easily.

If you need medium performance, or are doing primarily small transactions
then you can't beat MTI

Chris Byrne




-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Robert Novak
Sent: 01 April 2002 21:44
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: [rescue] RE: somewhat OT: secondary market storage?


On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, Chris Byrne wrote:

> I would Highly recommend looking at the MTI solution. It's highly
> modular and scales from under a terr to over 100. I've found them in
> general to be very responsive and willing to work with a customer
> since they know they're at a big disadvantage with EMC, Hitachi, HP,
> IBM, Sun, and Compaq all ahead of the game on them.

Heh. The product looked good, but I had an uberdweeby sales rep when I
brought them in to pitch against Sun and Baydel. He recited the quote to
me, line for line, misreading gigabytes as "megabytes" every time... at
the time it was around $85K for 217GB or so... and when I didn't go with
him, he called me and railed on me for 23 minutes about how I wasn't
taking my company's needs into consideration by choosing a product better
suited to my needs and budget. I just sat there and listened, letting him
dig his hole, and I tell that story to every storage vendor I meet with.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I know a guy who would preach the Netapp
gospel to you, and I could tell the story about them promising
faster-than-local-disk and the sales guy not bringing enough spindles in
to get within 10% of it... or the Auspex guys coming into my company at
the time--one of the earlier GigabitEthernet routing switch companies--and
saying nobody was using GigE so it didn't matter... funny that with all
this crud I end up working for a storage company. :) Raidzone looks cool
to me these days, actually. (I don't work for them though)

--Rob

Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com *
indyramp.com/~rnovak
	"I don't want to doubt you, Know everything about you
      I don't want to sit Across the table from you Wishing I could run."