Rahul Nabar wrote:
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Joe Landman
<land...@scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
Please indulge my taking a contrarian view based upon the products we
sell/support/ship.
I can't and won't sanction their tone to you ... they should have explained
things correctly. Given that PERC are rebadged LSI, yeah, I know perfectly
well a whole mess of drives that *do not* work correctly with them.
So please don't take Dell to task for trying to help you avoid making what
they consider a bad decision on specific components. There could be a
marketing aspect to it, but support is a cost, and they want to minimize
costs. Look at failure rates, and toss the suppliers who have very high
ones.
Another worry is what happens in the long run if the vendor either
folds shop or stops selling and / or supporting that particular model
of drive. Frequently the lifecycle of these devices is longer than the
warranty. The inability to shop around for drives could be an issue.
Especially with this rigid approach of firmware rejecting a foreign
component and not just a warning.
This is an issue with any proprietary technology. We talk about this in
terms of "freedom from bricking". For example, with Sun, there are
quite a few (now quite nervous) Thumper/Thor owners. Thumper has been
EOLed, and the future of Thor is uncertain at best. We have customers
ask us constantly if we take trade-ins, and others asking us if they can
buy the trade-ins for spares.
This is a real issue.
But it is tangential to the specific issue as initially discussed.
Perhaps this is a paranoid scenario since these are big vendors and
not likely to go bankrupt.
Erm ... uh ... Sun, SGI, LNXI, ...
Big != Safe.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
email: land...@scalableinformatics.com
web : http://scalableinformatics.com
http://scalableinformatics.com/jackrabbit
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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