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

[David Passmore]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 10:17:11PM +0100, Chris Byrne wrote:
> 
> 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

I don't usually throw in my two cents about vendors, but this is a totally
different experience than I've had.

At our height Excite at Home had over 120 terabytes of EMC equipment... rows
upon rows of 3830s and 8430s, including a couple of 3930s. I'm talking
dozens of these things.

In the several years that we ran this equipment, we had one-- count 'em, ONE
customer impacting failure of EMC equipment. There was a manufacturing
defect in the power supply, which caused some arcing and failure of the
whole cabinet. No data was lost. Afterwards EMC retooled the power supplies
and replaced every one of our old ones-- see if Sun will do that for e-cache
errors! (Sorry, a little bitterness there). It's the most redundant
equipment I've ever seen-- and it calls home upon FRU failure, and EMC will
come out and replace failed disks or boards transparently.

EMC is a great company. As an employer, there's no opportunity for 'fucking
around' there-- if you don't meet your numbers, you're history. If you fuck
up, you're gone.  It's draconian, and I kinda like that. Every EMC chassis,
every last one of them goes through a rigorous testing process-- heat, cold,
vibration. Other storage vendors just do random sampling, and their testing
process is pathetic by comparison. Tour Sun's Newark manufacturing facility,
then go to Massachusetts and see EMC's Franklin manufacturing center, and
you'll see what I mean.

Incidentally if you were an @Home customer, your e-mail was not hosted on
EMC, but on Sun A3500FC, which failed almost daily under load. Any
improvement you saw towards the end was due to a migration to EMC equipment.

If anyone is interested in profiling data I have of various storage vendors,
I will be glad to help. Don't buy the T3. Sun had to pull it out of an
evaluation because they had TWO WEEKS to get it up to advertised performance
and couldn't do it. You have to buy it in pairs, it has a serious LUN
limitation, it has a single controller...

David