I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from NetApp filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing this. What features would I loose?
- Bruce
I don't work for NetApp. But first ask what features would you GAIN by migrating to a Calera. You loose so many features, the first being the simplicity to manage them.
We just moved all of our NAS storage off Celeras to NetApps because of the so many issues. Email me directly incase you need more info. -G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:44 AM Subject: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from NetApp filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing this. What features would I loose?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortelnetworks.com barden2@csc.com CSC, Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877
Oh Boy! Did I create a storm in here!. I had many of you ask me for details. I am doing that right now. Will email you individually once I have compiled my issues. -G ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sto Rage©" Net_Backer@hotmail.com To: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com; toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 8:52 PM Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I don't work for NetApp. But first ask what features would you GAIN
by
migrating to a Calera. You loose so many features, the first being the simplicity to manage them.
We just moved all of our NAS storage off Celeras to NetApps because
of
the so many issues. Email me directly incase you need more info. -G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:44 AM Subject: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from NetApp filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing
this.
What features would I loose?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortelnetworks.com barden2@csc.com CSC, Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877
I can't help but ask, why on earth would you want to go away from a toaster over to a Celerra?
I would never use a Celerra for anything other than a boat anchor[1]. I had one. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. It was down 1/3 of the time and that isn't an exageration. I had to endure 16+ hour fsck's, almost half a dozen datamover panics a day. I replaced it with F840's and I've never had an issue since.
I'll stop ranting now otherwise I'll start foaming at the mouth again...
- Nick [1] And that's being very nice about it.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sto Rage©" Net_Backer@hotmail.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 2:32 PM Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
Oh Boy! Did I create a storm in here!. I had many of you ask me for details. I am doing that right now. Will email you individually once I have compiled my issues. -G ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sto Rage©" Net_Backer@hotmail.com To: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com; toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 8:52 PM Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I don't work for NetApp. But first ask what features would you GAIN
by
migrating to a Calera. You loose so many features, the first being the simplicity to manage them.
We just moved all of our NAS storage off Celeras to NetApps because
of
the so many issues. Email me directly incase you need more info. -G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:44 AM Subject: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from NetApp filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing
this.
What features would I loose?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortelnetworks.com barden2@csc.com CSC, Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877
Sto Rage© wrote:
Oh Boy! Did I create a storm in here!. I had many of you ask me for details. I am doing that right now. Will email you individually once I have compiled my issues. -G
Hello "negative ;-) big G"
Would it mind you to publish them in this mailing list? I'm afraid the demand for this list is even MUCH higher than you assume right now... :-) If you want to avoid any troubles ... and keep this list a personal list ... then please add me to your list of receivers ... :-)
Smile & regards! Dirk Schmiedt
OK. so here it is. But please remember these are my experiences over the last 3 years with EMC. YMMV. Things may have changed with the new NS600 series, but the basic arch is stll the same on their larger NAS systems. Behind all that hype, the Celera is still a piece of .... (well, they now have a Windows 2003 server based solution too, becasue they agree?) Don't get me wrong, I am not Anti-EMC or a Pro-NetApp. I am happy with their SAN so far.
Environment: Purlely CIFS based. H/W: Celerra (2 or 3 DataMover + 1 failover + 1 ControlStation, connected to a Symmetrix backend) in multiple sites
To summarize the EMC NAS architecture:
If you think about the Celerra solution you have a bunch of disparate components that are glued together to form the NAS server. It's a combination of many individual h/w units (at least the ones I have used so far). To get it all work is a challenge by it self. You need a data mover (couple if you need failover) a control station (again a couple if you need redundancy) , a FC switch (OEM from brocade/mcdata) to connect to the back end storage and then the backend storage itself (clariion or symmetrix). The datamovers are the equivalent of dedicated NFS/CIFS servers, and the control stations sit around doing out-of-band management and monitoring. The OS on the dmovers (DART) is a piece of crap, it still boots using MSDOS. The CS runs linux with many modified binaries/scripts to talk to the dmovers. You aren't getting a single solution here; it does all come in a couple of frames and EMC might set it all up for you initially (which would be a few months project) but any changes that you require will have to either be done by EMC or you're going to have to get in to all of the above horrible-to-manage areas to keep things running.
The problems I have had with the celerra so far: 1. It took EMC PS almost 6 months to get the thing installed working (under 10TB total NAS storage at multiple sites) and in the end they couldn't get it to work with NDMP and Netbackup. Suggested we backup over the LAN finally.
2. Needs a bin file change to add new disk or move volumes around. It took us 4 weeks to add few 100GB of storage at one site. Did I say we had to buy a new Dmover for this too? That thing is $50K a pop (all for a cheap PC that boots DOS first and then runs DART?).
3. The whole system would panic and shutdown if any of any of the data volumes fills up to 100%. (Note, not the root volume or tmp which is understandable, but the volumes you shared out). EMC's failover solution also does not work in this case. The Active datamover will panic and shutdown then the fail-over will kick in and panic too. It's not a one time incident, happened to us at least 4 to 5 times, at different locations. Wait till you hear their recovery procedure. We have to NFS mount the dmover volumes on to the control station and use unix to go in and delete files to recover some free space. Tell that to your Windows admins. What if your site has not unix admins? uh. We had a situation when their techsupport guy dialed in and deleted stuff that was important in a remote site.
4. Everytime Microsoft comes up with a new SP release there are problems connecting to the celeras. The current SP4 takes the cake! It panics the celeras. We had to sign support waivers with EMC because we were not ready to install their recommended patch the very same day they announced the problem.(Our past experiences with their patch/upgrades doesn't allow us to do whatever they recommend) We had the similar issue when SP2 came out, network performace used to be horribly slow, it took them 2 weeks to figure out the issue, that too after we pointed out that its only the machines with SP2 that are having this issue.
5. Each datamover had a limitation on how many volumes/shares it can support. There is no written documentation on this 9at least i haven't seen one), but their SE/Architect would not agree to create bin files with more that 4 volumes per Dmover in our environment. and each volume could not be over 200GB in size. Effectively limiting the capacity of a dmover to 800GB. They now tell us the new dmover (version5?) supports larger volumes (1TB), but still has a limitation of 4 TB per dmover. They say this has to do with fsck time. Try explaining this to the Windows guys. If their stuff is so reliable and redundant, why bother about fsck times?
6. OK so you wanted the Celera because it is a NAS solution. Then why do you need to have a SAN in between? If you need to hookup the celera to the backend storage, you will have to get a SAN fabric switch if the backend is Symmetrix. Even the Control station needs a FC port just to monitor something (if that link breaks, behold, the CS panics!). So if you have a fabric-attached unit then you still have all of the issues of zoning and LUN masking to worry about so that you can keep the disks seen by each datamover separate. Tell me once again, Why do I need this on a simple NAS that dishes out a few CIFS shares?
7. Their anti-virus solution. The CAVA agent and server would always crash, preventing users from accessing the shares. All AV vendors that I know of dropped support for their version of AV for Celera.
8. The infamous "UserMapper". Another piece of "value-added" crap from EMC. As per their manual, needed to map the Windows user logins to their equivelant Unix user IDs. It took me 2 weeks to explain this to our Windows support team, " please tell me gain, why do we need Unix logins to access a CIFS share?". It would have been OK if this damn thing worked. But.... you need 2 external Wndows machine to run an usermapper service that would hang and crash the server whenever it chose to, blocking users from accessing their data. Oh, so they made an improvement in the version 3, we could run it on the CS and didn't need those external windows boxes anymore. Good, but if you turn off the Control Station too long (remember it is just a monitoring station? nothing on it is in the criticle path of the data?), it turns out that users cannot login again because there is no user mapper. So in the end you bring up those old windows boxes again running user mapper... Well if you needed "that" kind of redundancy you shoudl have gone in for 2 CS was their answer. (BTW, I am told that the NS600 with clariion does not support 2 CS).
9. have you tried implementing quotas or snapshots on these ? Look at the user manual to see the what is involved, even a unix admin will faint.
10. Did I mention about their expensive GUI tool that the Windows guys could uses to "manage" the celerra? Well it sends out emails daily like these, can you help me figure this out ?: # # Celerra Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXX, Control Station: # ************* Jan 22, 2004 6:34:17 PM ************* Alert: W0 ************* Jan 22, 2004 6:34:17 PM ************* Alert: W0 ************* Jan 22, 2004 6:34:17 PM *************
I could go on and on... but will rest my case here.
-G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sto Rage©" Net_Backer@hotmail.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 2:32 PM Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
Oh Boy! Did I create a storm in here!. I had many of you ask me for details. I am doing that right now. Will email you individually once
I
have compiled my issues. -G ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sto Rage©" Net_Backer@hotmail.com To: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com;
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 8:52 PM Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I don't work for NetApp. But first ask what features would you
GAIN
by
migrating to a Calera. You loose so many features, the first being the simplicity to
manage
them.
We just moved all of our NAS storage off Celeras to NetApps
because
of
the so many issues. Email me directly incase you need more info. -G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:44 AM Subject: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from
NetApp
filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing
this.
What features would I loose?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortelnetworks.com barden2@csc.com CSC, Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877
So that you understand where I am coming from, I am 2nd hand equipment dealer who has paid and tried to get things work out with distributors and had no help. I've tried to work with NetApps distritibutors to stop an account not to migrate to EMC....
So here is my conclusion...
A GOOD reason would be to migrate off NetApp at least here in HK as the channel are a bunch of #@$@$@$ that don't bother quoting upgrades to customers even after 4 weeks... Even after you harras them they take 2 weeks to respond.
Even if consultants come in to assist distributors to resell to NetApp customers that are going to migrate to EMC and still shaft consultants... (me).
And then there is price. EMC is being very aggressive, out here they are undercutting NetApp on clustered systems by around 50%.
Then there is licensing... Once you buy a NetApp its asset value is zero as you can't sell it or you cann't get NetApp resellers who will help you even if you pay the outrageous rates of full price. Yes, I read before NetApp have the right to protect their IP, we the customer have the right to protect our $'s.
From a "Storage Admins" perspective I am sure NetApp is the way to go but on a business perspective, support, licensing, assets etc... Ummm.... i really struggle to find a reason to run one.
I've not had that much experience with Network Appliances, but the ones I've had have been abysmal. So at least out here in HK, EMC is the way to go, don't even bother calling NetApp oor its channel, you will be waiting..... I am sure that in other countries NetApp its channel is not the same..
Anyway personally these guys have made it very clear that they are not interested in working with anyone who is trying to get their stuff relicensed and transferred properly even if you try to follow their ridiculous policies and pricings... To be the way to run this stuff is to run their equipment unlicensed and not paying support and getting parts from www.zerowait.com their support and knowledge is great.
All the best to you guys. Maren. (Seriously pissed off.)
On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, [iso-8859-1] Sto Rage© wrote:
I don't work for NetApp. But first ask what features would you GAIN by migrating to a Calera. You loose so many features, the first being the simplicity to manage them.
We just moved all of our NAS storage off Celeras to NetApps because of the so many issues. Email me directly incase you need more info. -G
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruce Arden" arden@nortelnetworks.com To: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:44 AM Subject: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
I have been asked what the problems would be migrating from NetApp filers to EMC Celerra. Has anyone had any experience of doing this. What features would I loose?
- Bruce
-- Bruce Arden arden@nortelnetworks.com barden2@csc.com CSC, Nortel, London Rd, Harlow, England +44 1279 40 2877
-------------------------------------------------------------- HKdotCOM Ltd AIM: MarenHKdotCOM Tel: 852 2865-4865 ext 888 leizaola@hk.com ICQ: 39905706 Fax: 852 2865-4100 -------------------------------------------------------------- HK's largest supplier of used Cisco and Sun. Join our liquidations list : http://www.lists.hk.com/lists/listinfo/liquidations
At 17:54 25.01.2004 +0800, you wrote:
So that you understand where I am coming from, I am 2nd hand equipment dealer who has paid and tried to get things work out with distributors and had no help. I've tried to work with NetApps distritibutors to stop an account not to migrate to EMC....
I absolutely agree with your opinion on many of these issues. The lisencing policies that Network Appliances use are totally horrid. My former employee chose EMC over netapp just for this cause. Once installed the value of the equipment is none, because it has no aftermarket whatsoever.
It's a crying shame, because NetApp is so simple and functional, and hosts so much power.
There was a discussion on this a while back, but I think that the Network Appliances administration are horrified that changing their lisencing policies will result in massive pritating of their software.
So they choose to serve the few who are willing to pay the horrid prices of new licenced equipment, and forget about the masses who chose EMC and other solutions for economical safety, and the aftermaket.
I think this is a pretty narrowminded way of thinking. Think of all the 2.hand equipment, and the ability for this to create a second revenue. I've seen netapps sell off ebay for just a couple of hundred bucks. I think they will be running pirated Data ontap versions. Just what Network Appliances seem to fear the most. The software are pirated in a big way, both by netadmins for private use and by small companies, because the alternative of getting a legal version is finacially synonymous with buying a new storagesystem.
Thanks for your time
J.
Well, you could just do what many companies do, at least here in the UK, and depreciate the equipment over the tax-man approved 4 year (or 3-year for IT equipment) cycle, at which point it has 0 book value, and who cares about its after-market value at that point?
Then you give it to your techies on the sly for their own edification and amusement. Natch.
Sounds like the HK channel needs a good kicking to me. The joys of not-quite-communism creeping in faster than expected?
--On 25 January 2004 12:15 +0100 John Enger john@johnenger.com wrote:
At 17:54 25.01.2004 +0800, you wrote:
So that you understand where I am coming from, I am 2nd hand equipment dealer who has paid and tried to get things work out with distributors and had no help. I've tried to work with NetApps distritibutors to stop an account not to migrate to EMC....
I absolutely agree with your opinion on many of these issues. The lisencing policies that Network Appliances use are totally horrid. My former employee chose EMC over netapp just for this cause. Once installed the value of the equipment is none, because it has no aftermarket whatsoever.
It's a crying shame, because NetApp is so simple and functional, and hosts so much power.
There was a discussion on this a while back, but I think that the Network Appliances administration are horrified that changing their lisencing policies will result in massive pritating of their software.
So they choose to serve the few who are willing to pay the horrid prices of new licenced equipment, and forget about the masses who chose EMC and other solutions for economical safety, and the aftermaket.
I think this is a pretty narrowminded way of thinking. Think of all the 2.hand equipment, and the ability for this to create a second revenue. I've seen netapps sell off ebay for just a couple of hundred bucks. I think they will be running pirated Data ontap versions. Just what Network Appliances seem to fear the most. The software are pirated in a big way, both by netadmins for private use and by small companies, because the alternative of getting a legal version is finacially synonymous with buying a new storagesystem.
Thanks for your time
J.
On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, Mark Simmons wrote:
Well, you could just do what many companies do, at least here in the UK, and depreciate the equipment over the tax-man approved 4 year (or 3-year for IT equipment) cycle, at which point it has 0 book value, and who cares about its after-market value at that point?
Mark, I tend to dissagree. So to be honest, 2nd hand traders need guys like you to survive.
At least here in Asia many large companies are very well aware that their equipment once they are done with it, is still worth money. In some cases we have machines that are 5-8 years old eg Sun equipment is still hitting the market and getting back into circulation. In rare cases we have Sun boxes that are 10 years old going back into the market into production.
IMHO if you have equipment that after 3 years is only worth for giving to your technical people and can not be sold, I think you are running things a bit too tight.
When we are tearing down companies networks there is a huge difference from how much the 2nd hand equipment is worth based on how smart the CTO was at purchasing. Some brands, products and models just retain their value. A really good example is a E4000 I had, I got it with 250Mhz cpus with 4mb of cache 512MB of ram. I upgraded it to 8 x 450Mhz (8MB Cache) with 8GB of RAM, and out it went.
Structuring your assets properly into your corporation....
One of the ideas I've been having for companies to be able to transfer software and hardware like NetApp is to incorporate a separate company. So the day they go bust or they want to just sell the whole asset, the support contract and everything they just transfer a share. Out here it costs nothing to run keep a LTD company going about US$300/year.
Then you give it to your techies on the sly for their own edification and amusement. Natch.
Or better still, how about you get some money back for it?
Sounds like the HK channel needs a good kicking to me. The joys of not-quite-communism creeping in faster than expected?
I met with the Country manager and made it very clear that I can work with them. Something that Sun and Cisco will not do, as we work 2nd hand gear.
It seems that NetApp genuinely didn't know I was working on the deal, but both the distributor did know. Still no valid explanation came forward for why the Distributor treated me like they did.
Regards, Maren.
--On 25 January 2004 12:15 +0100 John Enger john@johnenger.com wrote:
At 17:54 25.01.2004 +0800, you wrote:
So that you understand where I am coming from, I am 2nd hand equipment dealer who has paid and tried to get things work out with distributors and had no help. I've tried to work with NetApps distritibutors to stop an account not to migrate to EMC....
I absolutely agree with your opinion on many of these issues. The lisencing policies that Network Appliances use are totally horrid. My former employee chose EMC over netapp just for this cause. Once installed the value of the equipment is none, because it has no aftermarket whatsoever.
It's a crying shame, because NetApp is so simple and functional, and hosts so much power.
There was a discussion on this a while back, but I think that the Network Appliances administration are horrified that changing their lisencing policies will result in massive pritating of their software.
So they choose to serve the few who are willing to pay the horrid prices of new licenced equipment, and forget about the masses who chose EMC and other solutions for economical safety, and the aftermaket.
I think this is a pretty narrowminded way of thinking. Think of all the 2.hand equipment, and the ability for this to create a second revenue. I've seen netapps sell off ebay for just a couple of hundred bucks. I think they will be running pirated Data ontap versions. Just what Network Appliances seem to fear the most. The software are pirated in a big way, both by netadmins for private use and by small companies, because the alternative of getting a legal version is finacially synonymous with buying a new storagesystem.
Thanks for your time
J.
-- -Mark ... an Englishman in London ...
-------------------------------------------------------------- HKdotCOM Ltd AIM: MarenHKdotCOM Tel: 852 2865-4865 ext 888 leizaola@hk.com ICQ: 39905706 Fax: 852 2865-4100 -------------------------------------------------------------- HK's largest supplier of used Cisco and Sun. Join our liquidations list : http://www.lists.hk.com/lists/listinfo/liquidations
Maren, I beg to differ with Mr. Enger's analysis that EMC's solution as economically safe. EMC's software is also non-transferable just like NetApp. EMC charges a tremendous amount of money for software too. Both companies value their products on their propriety software and not the commodity hardware in sits on. This results in the same after market value for the hardware - scrap value or spare parts value.
If you do sell your NetApp gear, keep your gear on maintenance until the buyer accepts the gear on their site. This process should(?) avoid a costly NetApp recertification. I would also include NetApp professional services for de-installing the gear and re-installing as part of the sales price to the buyer. Combined with the maintenance contract this should avoid any recertification charges. Consider your systems as a big spare parts kits if you have to dispose of it.
NetApp gear has significant trade-in value on other NetApp gear from NetApp. EMC gear also has trade-in value on NetApp solutions.
My first hand experience with these two solutions was at a very large EMC customer in the telecommunications industry. NetApp was evaluated against installed EMC Celerra's and EMC Symetrix's.
Both solutions were evaluated in the following categories: - NetApp vs EMC * Time to install and get the tests running - 2 days vs 45 * Ease of installation - 5 hours vs 14 days * Ongoing support time required to keep the systems in operation - .05 FTE vs .33 FTE * Performance running Oracle, - .5 hrs versus 1 hour * Equipment costs, - roughly equivalent after heavy discounts * Direct labor costs, - ~6X given FTE load * Uptime over a 8 month test period, 100% vs about .5 crashes per week * Availability - 99.99+ vs 97%
All of this resulted in EMC loosing all future business in two major new projects.
Hunter
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of John Enger Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 3:16 AM To: Maren S. Leizaola Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
At 17:54 25.01.2004 +0800, you wrote:
So that you understand where I am coming from, I am 2nd hand equipment dealer who has paid and tried to get things work out with distributors and had no help. I've tried to work with NetApps distritibutors to stop an account not to migrate to EMC....
I absolutely agree with your opinion on many of these issues. The lisencing policies that Network Appliances use are totally horrid. My former employee chose EMC over netapp just for this cause. Once installed the value of the equipment is none, because it has no aftermarket whatsoever.
It's a crying shame, because NetApp is so simple and functional, and hosts so much power.
There was a discussion on this a while back, but I think that the Network Appliances administration are horrified that changing their lisencing policies will result in massive pritating of their software.
So they choose to serve the few who are willing to pay the horrid prices of new licenced equipment, and forget about the masses who chose EMC and other solutions for economical safety, and the aftermaket.
I think this is a pretty narrowminded way of thinking. Think of all the 2.hand equipment, and the ability for this to create a second revenue. I've seen netapps sell off ebay for just a couple of hundred bucks. I think they will be running pirated Data ontap versions. Just what Network Appliances seem to fear the most. The software are pirated in a big way, both by netadmins for private use and by small companies, because the alternative of getting a legal version is finacially synonymous with buying a new storagesystem.
Thanks for your time
J.
Hi Scott:
1. Licensing - Correct me if I'm wrong but no end user software license is transferable under NA T&C's. Transferable licenses you discussed are/were associated with operating lease returns under which NA granted the lessor the right to retain and transfer the license once after the equipment was returned or bought by the lessee. The lease companies negotiated this to protect the residual values otherwise it had a scrap or spare parts value. I would agree that everything can be negotiated, but no enduser should ever assume their software licenses are transferable. You can negotiate a price, but NA will never give away the crown jewels. Remember the "Hobbyist License discussion" that quietly went away.. 2. Keeping equipment under maintenance - It only make sense to keep equipment (that you intend to sell) under maintenance if NA is going to hit the buyers with fees far in excess of the equipments value and it would in turn void your sales opportunity. It is very hard for any vendor to declare a piece of equipment not eligible for maintenance, with or without certification, when it is currently under one of their contracts. There "was" a NA web page that generally spelled out the certification process. Email NA and ask them is the easiest way. NA has very good records of when equipment goes on and off of maintenance. They can use this to ascertain the overall vintage, service records, financial costs, etc.. associated with serial numbers. It only makes good business sense for NA to avoid things like cooked or known flakey gear. Yes, I agree that buying spares off the used market makes great sense for anyone who wants plug and play on-site sparing (new or old gear) and is willing to keep and reasonable supply of throw away spares. Sending these spares in for repair under another systems contract will generate a lot of problems and bills from NetApp. 3. Keeping equipment (old or new) under maintenance, software and hardware, is no more than an insurance policy against problems that can't be quickly fixed by swapping or going back to previous rev's of the software. I.e. You have discovered a new bug and need a fix because your business is being interrupted and your last SW or HW upgrade was one way. Given NA overall reliability, dependability and MTTR these cases are very rare, but they can and do happen. Keeping software under contract makes very good business sense. You get all the maintenance updates, upgrades, knowledge base, intellectual resources, etc. If you have a problem and are out of "last supported Rev" you have no support other than static maintenance releases on the old versions of software that you may have not installed. ( On-line support will be helpful, but their focus is on current supported releases of the products.) Hardware firmware fixes also come with these services. These can be used to keep your spare parts in sync.
I don't think we are really in disagreement.
Hunter
Hunter M. Wylie 21193 French Prairie Rd Suite 100 St. Paul, Oregon 97137-9722 Bus: 866-367-8900 FAX: 503-633-8901 Cell: 503-880-1947
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Scott Fischmann Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 9:19 AM To: Hunter Wylie Cc: scott@unioncomputer.com; 'John Enger'; 'Maren S. Leizaola'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Migrating from NetApp to EMC Celera
Hi, Hunter:
Regarding:
1) NetApp / EMC licensing: As with pricing, transferable licenses can be and have been negotiated. We have bought and sold dozens of used NetApp filers with transferable licensing. Prospective buyers should never assume that licensing terms can't be negotiated!
2) NetApp maintenance / recertification: In most cases, I don't think it makes sense to keep NetApp gear under maintenance solely because of concerns over recertification charges. NetApp's 4-hour minimum charge to recertify used hardware in the field is reasonable, and I have never seen them take unfair advantage by going beyond the 4-hour minimum. Also, I have often seen them waive the charge in order to persuade their customers to place used gear under NetApp contract. Next, why even place older NetApp hardware (and software, for that matter) on contract with NetApp? Because of the availability of cheap and plentiful systems and parts, there are significantly cheaper -- and oftentimes better -- 3rd party and/or self-maintenance options. Finally, a decision to forgo NetApp hardware/software support will not affect a filer's license status.
-
Bruce Arden -
Dirk Schmiedt -
Hunter Wylie -
John Enger -
Maren S. Leizaola -
Mark Simmons -
Nick Steel (Lists) -
Scott Fischmann -
Sto Rage©