50Micron.com

I have a cousin. Very well-to-do man, owns a company that does something with storing and providing stock data to other users. I don’t pretent do know the details of the business, but what I do know is that it’s storage and bandwidth intensive.

He’s building his infrastructure on a home-grown storage solution – Tyan motherboards, Areca SATA controllers, infiniband back-end, etc. Probably screaming fast but I don’t have any hard-numbers on what kind of performance he’s getting.

Now I understand people like me not wanting to invest a quarter-mil on “enterprise-class” storage, but why would someone who’se complete and total livelihood depends on their storage infrastructure rely on an open-source, unsupported architecture?

One of the things you get with the Symmetrix is the 24×7 monitored support. One of the stories I tell people was about my first experience with EMC. When I worked at Intuit I was on the graveyeard operations shift. (The grunt shift, that most of us have been subjected to at least once in their lives) About 4am one morning I got a call from EMC saying that a hard-disk in our old Symmetrix-3 array had failed, and that the tech would be onsite in about 20 minutes (I guess they gave him the head-start) to replace it. I asked them if there was anything I needed to do and they told me that it was transparent and that the hosts wouldn’t notice the difference.

I was in love.

People ask what the “Enterprise” money gets you, and that’s it. You get the security of knowing that it doesn’t matter when, where, or how a failure happens, they are on top of it and have it dealt with before you even know the problem exists most of the time.

My second great EMC story – I was working at the Library of Congress on a tech-refresh, they had four Symm4 and 2 Symm5 arrays that were being upgraded to a pair of DMX’s. About two weeks before we were to have decomissioned one of the Symm4′s, it started experiencing problems. It seemd that 2 of the three power supplies had failed. The Symm4 was at least 7 years old at the time, and was designed for n+1 redundancy.

Even with two-thirds of it’s power gone, the thing kept running for almost 7 hours, tapping the internal batteries as needed. (Unfortunately it took only slightly longer to locate a replacement power-supply for such an antiquated peice of hardware, but at least it gave us the chance to gracefully power-down the last remaining hosts and gracefully power-off the Symm.

I’ve heard other stories, one in particular of a Symm in California that, after an earthquake, ran laying on it’s side until the hardware could be replaced and the data-migrated off it. (But having no first-hand knowledge of this, I will consider this an urban ledgend until someone who witnessed it tells me it really happened)

*THAT* is what you get for enterprise money.

Of course another relative from the same branch of the family is the one who told me “I have RAID, why do I need backups?”

Yes – I can say it.  Dell lied to me.

I have a problem with my new notebook.  Recently (read: less than 90 days ago) I bought a new Dell D620.  When I was forcibly ejected from my last company I found myself without a notebook computer.  So I logged in and bought one. 

Given that my new job requires extensive travel, I chose to spend the extra $300/US or so on their “Next Business Day” warranty.

They could have at least bought me a drink first.

According to Dell – next business day doesn’t mean it will be replaced in the next business day, it means the tech will call you on the next business day and schedule a time to come and replace your motherboard, and that time will be the “NEXT BUSINESS DAY AFTER HE RECEIVES THE PARTS”

That’s such a load I can’t even believe it.

So here I am with a laptop with one failed USB port, and the second one failing – an issue which Microsoft has already said contributed to the multiple failures Vista experienced, in a situation where the only day I’m not traveling in the next month is thanksgiving day.

So the fun part is:

The idiot Jr. level support dweeb told me, promised me after I asked him twice if he was sure, that the tech would come to my house ON THANKSGIVING DAY to replace the motherboard in my laptop.

Now I don’t hold him responsible (though I do hold him stupid for not checking his calendar before making a promise that you and I know will cost Dell a mint to fulfill) for Dell’s policies.  As a Jr. level support dweeb he effectively did his job of keeping me from getting to a more senior support dweeb.

But to promise support on a national holiday is hilarious, and I’m going to have a blast ramming that one down their throats when the guy doesn’t show up.

Sorry – it’s late, I’m tired, I’ve had a bad day. 

The hilarious part is – I even gave him the chance to back out of his lie:

The problem is, I think, that of course Dell doesn’t use support people from the US, which would mean that he didn’t realize that Thursday was a holiday. Don’t know, don’t care.  They made a promise now I expect them to follow through.