before commenting on this mail, i'd like to thank everyone for the spirited discussion on this issue. i'm particularly grateful to Cheena Srinivasan for his even-handed comments of Jun 5th. i don't see how disussing this openly can hurt NetApp or us toaster owners, and i'm pleased that NetApp agrees.
On Thu, 12 Jun 1997, Dave Hitz wrote:
Seems like the real question is would customers be willing to trade rebuild time for additional capacity on the low end. I'd certainly like to see the option available because we would favor high capacity whereas other customers may favor low rebuild times.
This is a tough question. There's an old UNIX saying:
We sell rope. If you hang yourself, it's your own fault.
hah! as a man with years of rope burns, i couldn't agree more.
I think that part of what distinguishes appliance vendors is that we don't like to sell rope. For instance, we've got no way to disable RAID in our system, and we always include NV-RAM.
i note that you do already give us rope, in the form of raid.reconstruct_speed, to hang ourselves a little, and we are trusted not to twist that around our necks. the question is not whether to sell rope, but how much rope is too much.
On the other hand, as our customers become more sophisticated and familiar with our products, perhaps it does make sense to be more flexible.
agreed, particularly with respect to allowing the customer to decide if he's got CPU to spare. for me, NetApp is most useful in working with me to discover the best use i can make of my toasters in my setup without unduly exposing myself, rather than laying down a blanket law designed to protect banks, software development shops, and office supplies vendors equally.
on the other other hand, i also quote, and approve of the latter half of, Christoph Doerbeck's statement:
I doubt that customers will ever become sophisticated. As long as coporate penny pinchers sign the purchase orders, they'll take the low road and expect us to miraculously save the day when something goes south. I think think it's a plus that NetApp sets margins of acceptible performance and sticks to them.
i think that it's wonderful that the out-of-the-box toaster comes armoured against all reasonable crises. i also note the old adage that "the only secure computer is a dead one", and feel that there's a fine line between *helping* the customer to run safely, and *forcing* the customer to run so safely that he can't do anything useful.
on a final, unrelated note, absent any objections, we're looking at getting a web-indexed archive of the toaster list postings together. news on that as it's made.
Tom Yates - Unix Chap - The Mathworks, Inc. - +1 (508) 647 7561 MAG#65061 DoD#0135 AMA#461546 1024/CFDFDE39 0C E7 46 60 BB 96 87 05 04 BD FB F8 BB 20 C1 8C "Microsoft (tm) is a single-sofa supplier"