This is an excerpt of an email that was sent to the management of a
company that I'm working with. They had spec'ed F85's for a fairly low
performance 10-20Mbits/sec. environment. The main requirement is
reliability and ease of use. How does one respond to blatant
misrepresentation of a competitors product?
barry
A few highlights of the comparison:
- The F85 is a stripped down, single CPU, low end device with multiple
points of
failure and a very poor data protection. NetApps service is rated very
low
by
industry experts and they offer next day shipment of parts that the user
must
install themselves.
- The IP4700 is fully redundant, multi-CPU, mid-range device with no
single
point of failure and hardware based RAID 5 data protection. EMC's world
class
customer service center has ranked #1 for 6 consecutive years by Gartner
Group.
Standard 2 year warranty guarantees 4 hours ON SITE w/Parts service by
EMC
technicians. Plus, our 'call home' proactive maintenance system
monitors
trends
within the system and reports them automatically to our customer service
center.
Often, EMC technicians will repair a system BEFORE the component
actually
fails.
The 4700 will be configured with 8 drives usable, plus 1 drive for RAID
5
parity
and 1 drive for hot swap redundancy. It is scalable all the way to
7000GB
(7TB)
vs. only 648GB for the F85. The 4700 as configured above is 8RU.
In general, the F85 does not scale sufficiently for growth, has poor
customer
service behind it, has no redundancy, has multiple points of failure,
and
utilizes a sub-par RAID 0 data protection scheme.