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@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

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