[rescue] RE: somewhat OT: secondary market storage?

[Derrick D. Daugherty]

It's rumored that around Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 03:14:56PM -0800
David Passmore <dpassmor at sneakers.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 10:17:11PM +0100, Chris Byrne wrote:
> > 
> > EMC: Their technology is crap, their reliability blows chunks by today's
> > standards, their tech support is horrible, and they want to control the box
> > completely. Every time you want to make a change they want to do it for you,
> > or you get no tech support. Their sales staff are the biggest load of
> > unscrupulous scumbags I've ever seen. They will literally do anything to get
> > a sale. I personally and directly know of one sale that involved the hiring
> > of prostitutes. Once they sell you THEY OWN YOUR ASS. or at least that's how
> > they see it. VERY VERY expensive and a poor value for money
> 
> I don't usually throw in my two cents about vendors, but this is a totally
> different experience than I've had.
> 
> At our height Excite at Home had over 120 terabytes of EMC equipment... rows
> upon rows of 3830s and 8430s, including a couple of 3930s. I'm talking
> dozens of these things.

I've heard good things from my friends that are at at Big Company.  I
operate in a 20-100 person range.  The evil startup field.  EMC could
care less.  I had two separate 3-day outtages, which equated to 20+ mil
in losses.  Acceptable?  fuck no.  reasons?  bad binfile/bad code and
again, bad code.  this was in teh past two years, on the symm 5 arch.

do they care when you're small?  not a bit.   my friends at huge
banking/finance/nsp's don't have these probs, us little guys with large
means, do.  they don't view our opinion as a threat, but i preach it as
much as i can.

E M C is not the right technology.  i'd say more but i don't want
friends to lose their jobs.

> In the several years that we ran this equipment, we had one-- count 'em, ONE
> customer impacting failure of EMC equipment. There was a manufacturing
> defect in the power supply, which caused some arcing and failure of the

I had two 3 day outtages..did they care? not a bit.  did we PAY?  hell
yes.

> EMC is a great company. As an employer, there's no opportunity for 'fucking
> around' there-- if you don't meet your numbers, you're history. If you fuck

no one likes working there.

> up, you're gone.  It's draconian, and I kinda like that. Every EMC chassis,
> every last one of them goes through a rigorous testing process-- heat, cold,
> vibration. Other storage vendors just do random sampling, and their testing

they say this, but it's BS from what i've seen and heard from their
engineers.  again, can't say names, but i've had belly laughes from
people up there when i've asked.  it's BS

> Incidentally if you were an @Home customer, your e-mail was not hosted on
> EMC, but on Sun A3500FC, which failed almost daily under load. Any
> improvement you saw towards the end was due to a migration to EMC equipment.

i've had opposite.  my backups are staged to a 3.5kfc array before they
go to tape.  i've had TWO drive failures..the symm?  over 20.  sure,
it's 7tb, but wtf with a drive every other week?

> If anyone is interested in profiling data I have of various storage vendors,
> I will be glad to help. Don't buy the T3. Sun had to pull it out of an
> evaluation because they had TWO WEEKS to get it up to advertised performance
> and couldn't do it. You have to buy it in pairs, it has a serious LUN
> limitation, it has a single controller...

thank you for this info.  i have yet to hear any sound positives for it.

i thought the 6910 a good fit too :\