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?”

Well, I finally have something NICE to say about someone.

I approached the Quantum Corp. buyout of ADIC with a little trepidation.  Our main library at work is an ADIC Scalar i500 with four FC attached LTO-3 drives and 36 tape slots, that’s about to be expanded to 6 drives and 96 slots.

Our small backup library is a Dell PV122T, SuperDLT320, SCSI attached with 8 slots.

My library at home is something right in between.  it’s a Quantum Superloader DLT1, with 16 slots in the form of 2 8-slot magazines.

I picked the Quantum up for a steal on Ebay – paid $200 for it with 18 months of waranty still left on it.

Last week I guess it got ahold of a bad tape and the tape broke the take-up real off the hook that is supposed to hold it until a tape is inserted.

Nothing more painful than turning on the library and hearing that “spinning” sound that means the leader tape is flipping around loose in the chassis.

So i called Quantum, and they were more than helpful.  Once we got past an initial issue with me having the wrong serial # for the box (silly me, the serial # is printed on the invoice, and bears no relation to what is printed on the back of the unit itself) I got into support.

We spent about 15 minutes troubleshooting the issue, and when it became evident to the tech that I might actually know what I’m talking about, they shipped a new drive unit via overnight.

Damned if it wasn’t here by 9am the following morning.  *THAT* is what I call service.  Came with complete instructions on how to replace the unit (4 screws and 3 cable connections, not that hard considering this particular unit has *NO* cables internal to the unit.  The entire drive assembly slides out the back and is a single FRU)

Anyway, I just wanted to say that this looks like the beginning of a promising relationship.