[rescue] forgive me father, for I have sinned

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 02:46:15PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   The NS6000 at SkyCache was supported.  By me.  Worked great.  It had 
> a few problems here and there, and I fixed them.
> 
>   Despite the very well-trained nature of techs in our industry when it 
> comes to buying overpriced, unnecessary "support" contracts, there's 
> really nothing magical about vendor support...except for the fact that 
> they care about the data on my machines a lot less than I do.

There might also be something to be said for availability of spares.

And, in theory they should be able to diagnose problems faster.  That
seems to often end up being a false assumption though.
 
>   Not even close.  Don't underestimate the power of hardware-assisted 
> RAID, dedicated processors for RAID parity, dedicated processors for 
> UDP checksums and XDR encoding, hardware-assisted.  PC toyz won't be 
> able to touch that, unless you spend almost as much as you paid for 
> those Auspex boxes.
> 
>   It's really a matter of how serious you are about performance and 
> reliability.

How many interfaces did they typically have, and of what speeds?  HIPPI?