[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks./Postfix

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 4 Jul 2004 17:51:03 -0500 (CDT), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> I think a good hardware maintenance contract is hardly likely
> anywhere.

For me, a good h/w contract involves an engineer turning up same day
with the right part to swap out. So far I've had pretty good luck on
that front, although there was the time that D-HPaq sent out an engineer
only qualified to work with PC servers to fix a RAID controller attached
to an Alpha (but to his credit, he did fix the problem when he was told
what it was).

> My experience with WeSellExpensiveSANs is that their field engineers
> are thoroughly incapable and useful only in that if they break things

I haven't dealt with their field engineers yet, but I'm not overly
impressed with WeSellOtherExpensiveSANs's equipment so far (mostly the
software really). And all the SAN manufacturers seem to have
salescritters that make me want to look for that bag of feathers in
the basement, and hunt down the tar brush.

> > RAID processing may not buy you much. Mind you the external RAID
> > boxes like A1000s, T3s, and StorEdge 3510s are great fun to play
> > with.
> 
> The other reason being that the configuration of the metadevices is
> not tied to the software running on the computer.

It's certainly nicer just to pull the cable from the RAID box a couple
of U's down to reach the spare server when the live one blows up. But
you don't really want to use multiple different software RAID
implementations on the same os.