On Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:48:13 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
wrote:

Mmy opinion is the software for the hitachi stuff all sucks. There doesn't
seem to be any support website, I have no idea where you get docs, if they
exist or are even translated into English and the programs themselves are
just strange and somewhat crippled. I might use three different Hitachi
programs at once just to add a LUN to a host. It makes no sense, other
than Hitachi had non-technical people that can't spell SAN write the
management softare.

The hardware itself seems good. Every once in a while a drive fails and
somebody shows up to replace it.


Uh.. oh. This is turning into a religious war. Not to brag but let me tell you
my personal knowledge/experience about storage before I get on my soap box. I
have been working with HDS and EMC stuff since 1999. I am now a one man storage
consultant. I also know the celerra and the clariion very well, oh... NetApp( I
love Netapp!). Furthermore, I know the replication technologies of all of
them.. SRDF/A, timefinder, Truecopy, Shadowcopy, and the NAS replications. I
have hands on knowledge of all of them and am actively engaged in these
technologies, now.

Now, if I were to put a storage infrastructure into my own data center..... what
would I buy?? My answer is HDS & NetApp, hands down. From my experience, you
turn both of those on and you can walk away from them and go to your cubicle to
spend all your time surfing on the web to find the best place to buy a GI Joe
for your son's bithday. And, yes HDS is not perfect. Up until the recent
versions of Tuning manager, their software sucked. Also, their support staff
and sales people are limited. They don't buy me as many steak dinners as EMC
sales people.

As far as replication technologies. EMC and HDS are night and day. The
complexities of SRDF is insane compared with Truecopy. In Truecopy you edit the
HORCM files and kick the new disks in the pant and away they go. SRDF, you have
to issue very complicated RDF commands and then you have to stop the entire
replication group so you can add the new disks. Don't even try to compare
Celerra replication with NetApp. In my mind, the Celerra doesn't even deserve
to be considered considered next to the NetApp.

My personal theory is that EMC thrives on complexity and make more money with
support services. Admittedly, I have personally gained from their products
since I work in an EMC customer site.

One EMC item I personally do like is ECC. Of all the storage management
software, ECC is the most muture and most capable. If you wanna throw stones at
me, I don't mind. One major flaws with other storage management software is
that they scale poorly. Weather it is 50 or 150 hosts, once they get to their
numbers they turn into bloated and unuseable virus.

dogkicker