On Thu, 11 Mar 1999, Alvarado, Michael wrote:
- Extensive screening and thorough integration is the difference.
- Special driver software.
- Must meet exacting specifications.
I think you're going to have a tough time convincing everyone that slapping a Netapp label on the front of a Seagate drive somehow makes it worth the Netapp markup, burnin or no.
In fact when we bought our first filer we transferred a bunch of existing 4gb Seagates bought from Another Vendor to it, *with* the blessing of tech support. Is it the right model? they said. Is it one of the following firmware revisions? they said. Then go for it, they said. And the drives worked just fine. *Technical* restrictions for support, like model numbers and firmware revisions, sound perfectly reasonable to me.
Our then salesguy even put them on our support contract. Our current salesguy won't, but I have a hard time believing that reflects anything other than profit maximization.
And that's not something I begrude Netapp per se. They have a great product that I've generally been delighted with, and I wish them all the financial success the free market can drop in their laps. But let's be realistic about what's driving buy-only-our-drives support mandates.