On Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:25:57 PST, Sam Schorr sschorr@homestead.com wrote:

I think the reasoning here is not quite thorough enough. If I buy a Compaq server and then I install a 3-Com ethernet card, I still expect, and get, full support from Compaq. This has been the case in the clone, or Intel world for quite awhile. I know that it is less true the more proprietary you get, but still is essentially the case, even in the IBM mainframe world and in the UNIX world. I am now in the middle of an issue between Network Appliance and Microsoft and I would NEVER buy another filer if NetApp tried to deflect response to the fact that I use Microsoft products and therefore I should debug the Microsoft side first. Whether I like it or not, and whether NetApp likes it or not, multi-vendor environments MUST be supported

• there is no option.

I agree, in general.

I think netapp's position is somewhat justified, because they can claim -- and I take it on face value -- that they stress disks more than other vendors. Therefore, they claim, they have to test each model disk and even each firmware revision before quality assuring it. In theory, any generic disk should work, but there's enough "practice" out there to show that different disks stand up to various stresses differently.

I can accept this, but I'm not sure why this also applies to memory. And I guess I can accept it with scsi boards and ethernet boards, but I'm not entirely happy about it. It seems to me they could QA more add-ons than the ones they sell.