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