Re: NetAps vs EMC

[Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be>]

At 8:56 AM -0600 2001/1/31, Mr. Alcourt wrote:

>  My problem with EMC is that I don't have _any_ management interface that
>  EMC is willing to tell me about.  Because of the model of local disk and
>  the fact that we were forced to run at Solaris 2.6, we were forced to
>  reboot after editing the /kernel/drv/sd.conf file just to allow the system
>  access to access a bit more drive space that already existed inside the
>  EMC array.

	Surely this is a filesystem or volume manager issue, and not a 
problem with EMC.  Are you using Veritas VxVM and/or VxFS?  I know 
that VxVM gives you tools to grow volumes online, and I know that 
VxFS gives you tools to grow and shrink filesystems online. 
Therefore, so long as the volume can be grown in a manner that VxFS 
understands, you don't even necessarily have to be running VxVM.

>  I admit, there is a good chance that my problems are due to the
>  individuals at EMC that I am dealing with.  But I get nervous when I'm
>  told to pretend it's just a very big disk array with no management control
>  needed, until we decide to take advantage of a little more hard drive
>  space and are told we need a new bin file and new microcode and only EMC
>  can provide such.  (Yet the hard drives were already installed in the
>  array, we just weren't using them yet.)

	If that's what EMC is telling you, then I absolutely agree -- 
they are not doing their job, and they should be required to pull the 
equipment out of the computer room with their "undercarriages" (see 
<http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_165238.html>).

--
   These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
======================================================================
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>