[rescue] forgive me father, for I have sinned

[Dave McGuire]

On Mar 3, 2004, at 10:14 AM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>>   The NS6000 at SkyCache was supported.  By me.  Worked great.  It had
>> a few problems here and there, and I fixed them.
>>
>>   Despite the very well-trained nature of techs in our industry when 
>> it
>> comes to buying overpriced, unnecessary "support" contracts, there's
>> really nothing magical about vendor support...except for the fact that
>> they care about the data on my machines a lot less than I do.
>
> There might also be something to be said for availability of spares.

   Auspex parts are not hard to find, and they rarely fail in the first 
place.  PC hardware is made to be disposable...not much else is.

> And, in theory they should be able to diagnose problems faster.  That
> seems to often end up being a false assumption though.

   Well in theory this should be the case...but I've never seen that 
borne out in the real world.

>>   Not even close.  Don't underestimate the power of hardware-assisted
>> RAID, dedicated processors for RAID parity, dedicated processors for
>> UDP checksums and XDR encoding, hardware-assisted.  PC toyz won't be
>> able to touch that, unless you spend almost as much as you paid for
>> those Auspex boxes.
>>
>>   It's really a matter of how serious you are about performance and
>> reliability.
>
> How many interfaces did they typically have, and of what speeds?  
> HIPPI?

   Network interfaces?  Typically four to sixteen 10 or 100Mbps ethernet 
interfaces, or perhaps a few FDDI interfaces.  They also had ATM, but 
I've never seen HIPPI on an Auspex.

          -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                      "My tummy hurts now, but my soul
Cape Coral, FL                   feels a little better."     -Ed