Typical blatant lies from EMC trying to pass of that thing as a NAS box. We get on-site service with 2 hour response time from NTAP. We also had the IP4700 here for evaluation. We benched it against an F720, which was about the same in performance, but light years behind in EVERYTHING ELSE. Which EMC used to bate and switch us to the SYM/Cellera combo, and then the discounting!!!....... Why not give us the price the first or 2nd time we ask. If you want a chuckle ask for the IP4700 System Admin guide in .pdf, then scan for the phrase "lose data," that should come up about a dozen times. Bottom line- do you want to do business with a company that will lie to your face? Yes, they do have some good Nick's tickets! Do a side by side comparison, and tell EMC you'll publish the results- then watch them back pedal!

Frank

This is an excerpt of an email that was sent to the management of a company that I'm working with. They had spec'ed F85's for a fairly low performance 10-20Mbits/sec. environment. The main requirement is reliability and ease of use. How does one respond to blatant misrepresentation of a competitors product?

barry

A few highlights of the comparison:

• The F85 is a stripped down, single CPU, low end device with multiple

points of failure and a very poor data protection. NetApps service is rated very low by industry experts and they offer next day shipment of parts that the user must install themselves.

• The IP4700 is fully redundant, multi-CPU, mid-range device with no

single point of failure and hardware based RAID 5 data protection. EMC's world class customer service center has ranked #1 for 6 consecutive years by Gartner Group. Standard 2 year warranty guarantees 4 hours ON SITE w/Parts service by EMC technicians. Plus, our 'call home' proactive maintenance system monitors trends within the system and reports them automatically to our customer service center. Often, EMC technicians will repair a system BEFORE the component actually fails.

The 4700 will be configured with 8 drives usable, plus 1 drive for RAID 5 parity and 1 drive for hot swap redundancy. It is scalable all the way to 7000GB (7TB) vs. only 648GB for the F85. The 4700 as configured above is 8RU.

In general, the F85 does not scale sufficiently for growth, has poor customer service behind it, has no redundancy, has multiple points of failure, and utilizes a sub-par RAID 0 data protection scheme.

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