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

[Chris Byrne]

-----Original Message-----
From:  Brian Hechinger
Subject: Re: [rescue] RE: somewhat OT: secondary market storage?

<snip>
>i hate EMC.  their hardware is not great and their support BLOWS.

I think that says it all right there

> Hitachi: Their performance and technology are great, but their marketing
and
> but they are a little less anal about it. Very expensive, but worth it
>
>very expensive.  VERY IMPRESSIVE HARDWARE.  blows away any of the crap EMC
>ever made.

Exactly my point

>FE is spotty, our FEs were people who sorta knew about computers
>reading out of a fucking manual.  hell, *I* can do that.

I've found the same thing with the field service people from most storage
companies. They usually know their boxes back and forth, but they don't know
shit about the systems they attach to.

>it takes a little convincing, but you can get HDS to let you have control
of the box, although
>you can't stop it from calling home or they will void your support
contract.
>that's ok, it's nice getting a phone call, "hey, you lost a disk, i'm
>downstairs with a new one, could you let me in?"

Yeah, it takes more than a little getting used to for me since i'm a
security guy, but I've had that happen more than once (we had 40 sites with
HDS boxes), and eventually the paranoia is balanced by the warm rosy feeling
of a covered ass ;-)

>does NetApp even do "direct attach" stuff?  i thought they were all NAS.
>i've dealt with them quite often, and they kick a large amount of NAS ass.
>if i have to pick a NAS, that's the one i'll pick.  we have EMC NAS boxes
and
>they are JUNK.

NetApp doesnt do direct attach but they have a couple of things other than
NAS. They tried doing fiddly things like database specific boxes and web
server specific boxes etc... I don't know if they still market them or not.

The addons to symmettrix for NAS are just about the worst shit I've ever
seen sold as an enterprise computing product (the worst has got to be the
whole CA Unicenter/Jasmine integration thing. 3 million dollers, 12 months
of a ten man pro-serv team, and still nothing worked)

Chris Byrne