The truly sad thing is that you are correct in that most people won't buy Michael's argument but that Michael is correct when he tries to communicate how much work goes into disk drive qualification and how painful the problems can be if you try and put in joe-random-disk drive, even the same model from the same vendor, and get unlucky.
Heck, *I* didn't buy the argument until I spent a few years at another company where I exposed to some of what happens in drive qualification and saw what could go wrong in the lab and in the field.
To be safe, you really need the same vendor, same drive, and exact same firmware and that's typically very hard to get unless you buy from the system vendor instead of the drive vendor. Even then, that's not a guarantee that you won't get bit, your odds are just better.
Ray
-----Original Message----- From: Jim Davis [mailto:jdavis@CS.Arizona.EDU] Sent: Thursday, March 11, 1999 10:16 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: FW: Shelves, disks, et al
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.