50Micron.com

Ok, there is something I hate about Cisco- and it’s not really about Cisco, it’s about EMC’s complete failure to completely support their MDS series of switches.

First – When you buy an MDS 9xxx switch from Cisco, it comes with the ability to dial into Cisco when there is a problem, much like EMC does with the Symmetrix.  This feature is not available when you buy the switch from EMC.  (IE a Cisco switch with a $10,000 sticker on it that says “EMC”) you don’t get this ability.  In fact, you get no dial-home capability at all. 

I called in to the SAC, talked to our sales team, our former Project Manager who was (sort-of) handling the implentation, etc, and the long and the short of it is that in order to be notified when there is a problem with the switch, you have to set Control Center up to email you, and then you have to call EMC.  (I’ve called them so many times I know the number by heart)

Secondly, (and more to the point of the subject of this email) making a zoning change in ECC requires that you log into the switch and type “copy run start” at the prompt to save the configuration to the start-up.  I’ve known people to go months without doing this – only to find that every zoning change made in the last number of weeks is lost on the reboot of the switch.

And Third – when you do call EMC for support, they have to wait on Cisco to ship the parts.  So technically you’re not even really getting EMC support, you’re getting third party “ghost” support.

This seems to me to be inexcusable considering the number of MDS switches that EMC is putting on the market.

My advice – if you’re going to buy a Cisco fibrechannel switch, and I do recomend them, buy it from Cisco.  Until EMC decides to support them fully, I don’t think it’s worth the convienence of getting everything from one place given what you come up short on.

You know, corporations (like EMC) must think we’re stupid.

I read in eWeek ( Link ) that EMC is going to kick 1,250 people out on their asses right before the holidays because they failed to make it last quarter.

I guess people are just so much chattle, to be sold off whenever profits need a boost.  What most people (investors) don’t know, is that kicking 1250 people to the curb does absolutly NOTHING to bolster their bottom line.

They won’t lay off sales people, they are the “bread and butter” of the organization, right?  And obviously it won’t be the engineers, they are busy busy designing the new product.

That leaves the lowly professional services people.

I’ve been working with and for EMC (directly and indirectly) for close to seven years now.  I can tell you one thing.  When they lay-off PS people, they will, with a 100% certainty, have to turn to consultants and partners to get the promised work done.  Partner companies cost about 3-5 times as much as internal employees  (probably a bit less when you take benefiits into consideration). 

Eventually, and I can now count 4 times this has happened, they will realize how much money they are spending on partners and consultants and declare a moratorium on partner utilization.  This requires them to hire the people they laid off, usually at higher salaries (because these same people went to work for the partners when they got laid off) and  usually only get the lower quality employees back.

(Sorry EMC, but the partners pay better than you do, by a good sized margin.)

They try to entice people to hire in, and in my case specifically, by telling me what a stable place EMC was and how I would be insulated from the ups and downs of the market.

Apparently not – 1,250 people are going to find out how insulated they really are.

Right before Christmas….

Oh – and by the way.  Some of your customers (me included) take note of how you treat people.  I know I’m shopping around quotes right now that I might have otherwise gone straight to EMC for.

 

I had to re-write this one, I didn’t like my first run at it.

As one part of my duties, I manage the companies one and only fileserver.  We run on a fairly simple rule, if it’s a file share it goes on the Celerra.  There are *NO* windows fileservers in our environment.

Setting this up was fun.  We run CAVA (Celerra Anti Virus Agent) to protect against those nasty windows virii that are constantly running around (my Linux desktop at work is immune) and the Celerra fileserver (It’s an NS500G with a Clariion back-end for anyone who cares) has been wildly successful.  Only one real problem in the six months I’ve had it up and running, and that was when one of our applications, “Argo” (a credit decisioning engine of the sort used by banks – www.argodata.com) dumped 150 gig worth of trace files into the netowrk file system and the filesystem in particular tried to start a second auto-expansion before the first one had completed.

Now the fun begins.  With the auto-expansion set I’ve been able to take a more hands-off approach to managing it.  I probably should have kept a closer eye.

Did you know that in EMC Control Center there are more NAS management tools for Network Appliance (www.netapp.com) then there are for their own NAS front-end?  The one thing I needed was a report of when my storage pool got to within 10% so I could plan on either allocating more LUNS to the NAS or to purchase more.  (The cause of my last post)

Such a report apparently doesn’t exist.  So when I logged in today for my weekly check to find that these greedy people I work with have in three months managed to chew through 2 terabytes of storage.

So now I have to scramble to come up with more “temporary” storage.  (It’s been my experience that nothing is more permanent than a temporary storage assignment.)  I found some – but really hope that the Exchange environment doesn’t grow before we get the new Symmetrix spun up, because it no longer has anywhere to grow to.