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

[David Passmore]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 09:41:50PM -0600, Derrick D. Daugherty wrote:

> do they care when you're small?  not a bit.   my friends at huge
> banking/finance/nsp's don't have these probs, us little guys with large
> means, do.  they don't view our opinion as a threat, but i preach it as
> much as i can.
> 
> E M C is not the right technology.  i'd say more but i don't want
> friends to lose their jobs.

I think the answer to this is: if you're small, don't buy EMC. Despite the
fact that they seem to own the market, I definitely don't think they're cost
effective for smaller shops.

> no one likes working there.

I spoke to several salespeople and engineers there. I think you have to
thrive on stress to work there.

> > 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
> 
> they say this, but it's BS from what i've seen and heard from their
> engineers.  again, can't say names, but i've had belly laughes from
> people up there when i've asked.  it's BS

I've been to the manufacturing facility in Franklin, MA. They're not
kidding. They have hot and cold rooms with hundreds of chassis in there at a
time (I know, I went through them, sweating and freezing my ass off). Plus
the vibration testing. It literally is like a testing assembly line. I know
it sounds unbelievable, but you just have to see it. I watched some of our
chassis on order go through the process. The facility is the size of several
football fields... it was a pretty humbling sight.

> i've had opposite.  my backups are staged to a 3.5kfc array before they
> go to tape.  i've had TWO drive failures..the symm?  over 20.  sure,
> it's 7tb, but wtf with a drive every other week?

Let me qualify this: the A3500FC fails a lot under high load. I'm talking
full-bore here. Soft controller failures left and right. You can manually
put the controller back online and things will be fine, but sometimes it
really messes up the data.

> thank you for this info.  i have yet to hear any sound positives for it.
> 
> i thought the 6910 a good fit too :\

Granted that I haven't worked with the T3s for over a year, but given Sun's
track record with storage I don't know that they've improved that much. It
sounds like the 2 LUN limit is still there, and the single controller
effectively rules out RAID-5; if you want controller redundancy you have to
mirror between trays with software RAID.

David