Toasters,
Inherited a few production 7-mode systems that are off maintenance, due to be retired and pretty low on spare disks. Migrations to new ONTAP 9 systems (A300's, yay!) are in progress but I'd like to purchase several spare disks for the 7-mode systems as a safety measure. Unfortunately, these disks are so old that NetApp no longer sells them.
Is it generally safe to purchase refurbished (or new) NetApp disks from a 3rd party? Can anybody recommend a vendor?
I already grabbed quotes from our NetApp account team for lager capacity disks that I'm told won't be a problem for existing RAID groups made up of smaller disks. Primary concern is keeping the data safe/available so, if purchasing 3rd party is a bad idea, we'll definitely to through NetApp.
3rd party options always come up in discussions and we've never gotten outside feedback so just curious if anybody has had good or bad experiences going 3rd party.
Thank you. Phil