Humorously enough, since I posted my response to Chris, I have actually received 2 shirts. One came from a vendor (who monitors this forum) whose software I am presently evaluating (thank you Donna and Judy), and the other came from ..... Well, perhaps I had better not say.
Suffuce it to say that the next time a Netapp sales rep comes around he may discover that some of his competitors are not so cheap with the swag!
"Timothy Cook" TCOOK@joy.com 04/20/01 08:35am >>>
Maybe I'm missing out on the really important aspect of netapps???
Other than a jacket I got at Admin training I've never received my new clothing line from Netapp! Is this an optional part of the Support Agreement, or should I start complaining that I'm not receiving the level of support from Netapp that I should be!
For the benefit of you netapp guys who monitor this board, I wear an Extra Large.
Of course, in Netapps defense, I've never received any EMC shirts either.
(p.s. don't bother with the boxer shorts, I won't wear them)
Chris Lamb skeezics@measurecast.com 04/19/01 07:00pm >>>
My story about EMC is rather different, I guess.
Some local EMC reps scheduled a visit with my boss and came to visit us a while back. I wore not one but _two_ NetApp shirts that day - the very cool engineering shirt (black pre-F630 shirt with Mothra on the back) and the snazzy denim Land's End shirt with the embroidered logo on it. The night before I printed a copy of the recent INPUT survey, highlighting the part where I'm quoted (anonymously), and left it on my boss's chair. He brought it to the meeting.
They arrived. I smiled and shook hands and did the business card thing. We sat down at the conference table. They asked their questions, and I politely answered them. It went something like this:
"What about reliability?" they asked.
"I've been running NetApps since 1995, and to the best of my recollection I have never once lost data due to hardware or software failure," I replied.
"Yes, but what about uptime?" they inquired.
"alexandria> uptime 3:32pm up 187 days, 14:10 1162740653 NFS ops, 129052586 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops colossus> uptime 3:32pm up 171 days, 8:48 1692312427 NFS ops, 0 CIFS ops, 0 HTTP ops", was my reply.
"Expandability?" they suggested.
"I have 21 free slots for more disks - I bought the box with extra shelves and a 2nd controller so that I could grow it on-line without any need for downtime. I can grow our box to > 1TB without even thinking hard."
"Performance!" they pleaded.
"My Oracle DBA is happy, and says he can't see a difference between the 760 and a locally-attached dual-loop A5200. Besides, with a head-swap we can trade up to the 800-series, or cluster, or trade-up and then cluster, and I've got all the slots I need to add extra Gigabit cards..."
"Yes, but our 'phone home' support feature and customer service are second to none!" they intoned.
"Actually," I said, "your story about the hardware tech showing up on a Saturday with a replacement disk for a demo machine reminds me of a similar incident... one day a box arrived unexpectedly from Netapp with a replacement drive in it, which puzzled us because we hadn't reported a failure. But sure enough, we walked into the server room and one of the disk canisters had a red light on. Five minutes later we swapped it out and that was that. Sure a lot cheaper than sending a field circus guy out to do a job that any basic systems operator can do."
(Ouch, that stung a bit, but hey, I _like_ playing with the hardware, and if I have one complaint about the reliability of my filers it's that after I bolt it into the rack and plug it in, I don't get to fool around with it much. That's a blessing, of course. :-)
"And as for service, a funny thing happened in the middle of the night a few months back, when I was innocently rearranging some power cords to balance the load on a split-phase UPS, oblivious to the fact that the 'autosupport' emails were being sent out. Imagine my surprise when an email arrived 20 minutes later from the Netherlands, asking if I needed to have a replacement power supply shipped..."
They got the point. Clearly, they weren't going to make a sale that day. :-) But we listened to their presentation, and had a pleasant enough chat, and that was that. I had done my homework about their product line, too, and I think they knew it. They didn't try to BS me, and they didn't try to badmouth Netapp. So I can't comment on whether or not this is typical behavior from EMC reps, but my experience wasn't at all negative.
Mostly, though, it's the shirts. If my vendors didn't clothe me I'd have nothing to wear! :-)
-- Chris (still waiting for NetApp boxer shorts)
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com
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Timothy Cook