Joel C. Ewing wrote:
On 08/03/2010 06:16 AM, Ted MacNEIL wrote:
...
I've converted from one vendor to another, as a storage analyst, project
leader, and using outside consultants.
There is NO one feature, other than cost, that will make me pick one over the
other.
...
That depends on whether you are in a metropolitan area that is major
enough that support is not an issue. Once in the last two decades we
seriously looked at a non-IBM DASD vendor, but the closest non-IBM CE
support was two hours away versus local IBM support. The possibility of
something as critical as DASD being down for an extra two hours just
waiting for a CE to get on site was unacceptable and killed the deal.
We have had non-IBM hardware in the past. In the late 1970's this was a
mixed ITel (DASD & processor memory) and IBM (processor and other
peripherals); but vendor CE staffing for hardware support was totally
different in those days: We had resident CE's from both IBM and ITel
that shared an office, and they worked well together as a team.
Joel, I tend to disagree somewhat. While there's not a single "feature"
that would sway my decision, there is a single MISSING feature that
would very much influence my choice.
That feature is this: where are the single points of failure. For
example, I was told that all data going to/from a particular EMC unit
went through the cache, which "Never fails." But it CAN fail and I got
two "war stories" of EMC cache failures, both of which included
significant data loss. Nobody's product is perfect, no matter what the
marketting types will tell you. But our experiences with the 2105-F800
were a very pleasant set of experiences. When a failure did occur, the
device automatically adjusted for the failure, called home and kept
right on doing what it was supposed to do. Admittedly, the performance
was degraded but it did NOT result in a outage. Part of my job was to
look for that sort of thing and (patting myself on the back) I think I
did pretty doggone well. The IBM boxen were slightly pricier than the
EMC, HDS and STC boxen but, given our business priorities, the
difference was well worth it. YMMV.
Rick
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