[CentOS] Re: Need SAN suggestion

[jim bartus]

I'm vendor shopping right now because we've pretty much given up on our
CX500 and CX700.  The hardware itself is so-so, the software/management is
pretty bad, but both of those are nothing compared to the incredibly piss
poor level of customer service EMC provides.  Just getting quotes out of
them to buy new stuff, let alone getting support for what you own, is like
pulling teeth.  And not even someone else's teeth.  Your own.  With a
plumbers wrench and a ball peen hammer.

In two years we've been moved between three different sales teams.  Plus our
two sites are supported by two different support teams.  So coordinating
something like a firmware update where replication is involved is an epic
journey of phonetag and emails between six or seven different EMC employess,
*NONE* of which will talk to each other.  Its entirely up to you to
schedule, coordinate, and deal with any sort of sequence/dependency issues
by just relaying what one EMC employee said to you to another one, who will
then tell you you need to go talk to a third one.  Also at no point will any
of them know what you're talking about because they apparently don't use any
sort of CRM software.  Each and every new person you talk to you will have
to explain what hardware you have and what you're trying to do.  Its gotten
to the point where I can't use our SAN for new projects because it will add
weeks or months to the timeline.

Specific to CentOS/RHEL, powerpath is *extremely* finicky about kernel
versions.  They'll only validate against the main update kernels and maybe
one more a quarter, so there are going to be lots of times where you just
have to sit there and live with a security vulnerability for awhile.
Supposedly you can just not use powerpath and use the multipathing available
as of update4, but their sales guys won't even admit that, you have to dig
around and find it on their website.  Oh lord, that reminds me, their
customer support portal "Powerlink" is atrocious.  Think of cisco or ibm's
website, but with more javascript flyouts and every third link is a popup.

Sorry that turned a bit rantish.

-jim

On 11/23/06, Mindaugas <mind at bi.lt> wrote:
>
>
>   Hello,
>
>   It is not total off-topic since almost all connected servers will be
> RHEL
> and CentOS. :)
>
>   We are considering to purchase new storage system. The most probably we
> will be choosing between HP (EVA6000), EMC (CX3-20C) and Hitachi (similar
> model).
>   iSCSI connection is also required.
>
>   What are your experienced with listed systems? What to avoid? What ot
> expect?
>
>   Now I just know that sequential read/write preformance on EVA is poor.
> :)
>
>   Thanks,
>
>   Mindaugas
>
> --
> nahant-list mailing list
> nahant-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/nahant-list
>
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