Super High-End Club (storage mile high club?)

Oh, I can see the eyes rolling.  Two blogs by me in one day.  Hey, its an unwanted (if there is such a thing) holiday and its cold so I just vegged out.

I rarely visit other bloggers sites and I really need to do it more often.  Chris Evans' site is the exception as he writes what I somehow need to know.... and he uses Tuning Manager as well.  If only he had HSSM as well.

So today I visited Tony Pearsons' site just to see what goes on in the world.  I never leave comments as I refuse to accept the T&C's that IBM owns what I put on the site.  More often than not, Tony presents a somewhat interesting (and extremely PC) IBM site and he knows how to write about IBM storage as far as marketing goes.

So when I read about the Super High-End Club I was forced to think about some of the spec's put out by vendors.  One that has always been a highlight was Sun and the SE 3510.  I think that the 3510 was probably one of the first 2 Gbps FC arrays and the spec's were outstanding.  I mean so darn good you could not ignore this wonderful piece of kit.  That was until you used it en mass and you started seeing the shocking firmware issues that lasted until 4.15 or the last time I used one about a year ago.

So why did I choose a SE 9990 (USP 1100) nearly 18 months ago for a special project?  Price, performance and reliability.  Sun did a premium job of selling me the storage at a wonderful price.  Yes, I was impressed by the IOP's but they came from the XP 12000 site.  The Sun/HDS co partners did not focus on IOP's and to be honest, desperately tried to sell me a smaller system.  HP came in too expensive for the same kit and IBM and EMC were not considered for various reasons.  The selling point was reliability.  I needed outstanding performance and most importantly uptime.  EMC would be considered now if the same project came along.

So the point of this story is that I don't really care about IOPS as the premium selling point.  Sure, I want performance but I have seen organisations bitten by that sole factor and I won't do it.  A million dollars of junk SE 3510's proved that.  Lucky I did not make that decision....

Besides, I like doing my own maths.

And why was Transformers not released for Blu-ray?  If it had of been, I would have watched it and not blogged.....

Stephen