Speaking not as a NetApp employee but rather as a generic filesystem engineer, I'd say that the fundamental point being raised by the article is valid -- "Is Ultra-SCSI an attractive alternative to FC?" However, if I were being polite, I'd also say that the article was somewhat misleading, dishonest, and inaccurate. If I were being blunt and honest, I'd say ... ah, never mind :-).

Personally, I do think there's an open issue as to whether Ultra-SCSI is good enough for small servers with reasonable capacity requirements and I suspect that issue will be driven by cost. If Ultra-SCSI adapters and drives have significantly better price/performance ratio, then Ultra-SCSI will win on the low end and FC will win on the high end. If they're about even, I suspect FC will win.

Ray

-----Original Message----- From: Jaye Mathisen [mailto:mrcpu@internetcds.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 1999 1:26 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Anybody have any comment on this article, as relating to FCAL reliability?

(Long night tonight waiting on formatting RAID array.s :()

I do not have an FC-AL arrays at this time, although I know it is something that is rolling out.

The comments on reliability concern me a bit, at least for me, my NetApps have been "plug" and go.

No muss, no fuss.

http://www.performance-computing.com/features/9903sra.shtml

Just curious if people are having trouble with their FC-Al disks on their Netapps...