On 05/14/99 23:13:56 you wrote:
>
>On Fri, May 14, 1999 at 10:28:43PM +0000, Richard L. Rhodes wrote:
>> Our EMC sales rep sent this to me. Any thoughts or comments,
>> on what might have happened?
>>
>Sure. I know exactly what happened.
>
>Your EMC rep peed his pants when he saw a competitor having trouble
>in public, and made sure you were aware of it. Pretty typical of EMC
>reps, AFAICT.
They also went and posted it on the NTAP Yahoo message board.
As to what happened, the most *likely* scenario for any signficant
downtime of the Netapp is double disk failure. That is, one disk
failed, and during reconstruction they lost another.
However, the description of events (moving mailboxes) may or may
not support this. It's hard to rely on such technical details in
a media report. It's not clear whether or not data was actually
lost.
It's also possible that the had a crash due to a bug and this left
the filesystem is an inconsitent state and/or a state that caused
repeated crashes. In both this and the double-disk failure case,
they would have to run wack to make sure the filesystem was okay
before returning it to service. This sounds like the "cleaning"
they are talking about.
If they were running a cluster, most likely there would have been
no interruption in service. You get what you pay for. I'm sure
their Apache (or whatever) web servers have crashed more than their
filers have.
There doesn't seem to be much of a story here.
Bruce