[geeks] Why did Auspex lose and Netapp win?

[Shannon]

On 17-Jun-2012 14:38, velociraptor wrote:
> We had two at Cisco.  They worked reasonably well for their time, but
> they were run off embedded Sparc 20 hardware and were ran a modified
> SunOS 4.1.4, iirc, with all it's attendant limitations.  They were
> huge behemoths, using full sized disks, and like EMC's approach were
> intended to be black boxes.  They also used Micropolis as their disk
> supplier for the full-sized disks, and got bitten very, very hard by
> the 9gb disk failure fiasco that Micropolis had around 1996 or 1997.
> Iirc, the disk model was 1991?  

Oh, I remember that. Bad times for Micropolis and their users. Lot of
people calling them stuff like Micraposhit, etc.

It was not just one model as I recall, though it was mostly the 9GB
versions. We also had a lot of failures with 4GG I believe.

For awhile every single drive we got from Micropolis went bad, it was
only a matter of how long. We once created pools for a set of those
drives in a raid with 30 slots for which day of the month they would die.

I won one of the prizes with a guess of the second day, after hearing
one of them start screaming like a wild animal almost immediately.

We had very few drives live past the betting mark during that time and I
cannot remember any making it to the year mark.

About all they were good for was testing how robust various raid
solutions were.

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