On Tue, February 2, 2010 10:21, Marc Nicholas wrote: > I agree wholeheartedly....you're paying to make the problem "go away" in > an > expedient manner. That said, I see how much we spend on NetApp storage at > work and it makes me shudder ;)
Yes, exactly. Pricing must be about right, people wince but pay it :-). If they don't wince it's too low. There are certainly places (NASDAQ, say) who have to have absolute reliability (on both their main and disaster-recovery sites). That level of reliability costs money, and they pay it, probably even fairly cheerfully. Since spare parts have to be stocked and field service people trained, it makes sense that service contracts cover limited sets of equipment. And that's a strong argument for staying within that set of equipment. I do think that a lot of companies buy higher up the reliability curve than they need. But that's their choice. > I think someone was wondering if the large storage vendors have their own > microcode on drives? I can tell you that NetApp do...and that's one way > they > "lock you in" (if the drive doesn't report NetApp firmware, the filer will > "reject" the drive) and also how they do tricks like > soft-failure/re-validation, 520-byte sectors, etc. Sigh. It makes perfect sense that getting some special tricks in the drives actually pays off. And yet it's inevitable that they ALSO use it as a lockin. I've seen people down extra days while locked-in parts are shipped to them; the parts were essentially identical to what you could buy that day at retail locally, but the locally-available version wouldn't work. -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
