I've been a SAN and NAS administrator for some time now, but, as some
of you will notice from my previous posings, my experience is primarily
with EMC products.  Now where I work, we have a couple of AIX admin
goobers that-- although they have no real complaints about our
Symmetrix-- think that IBM's Shark is God's gift to man for high end
storage.

I continue to talk trash with these guys, but, to be honest, I've never
worked on a Shark, never worked anywhere that had a Shark, and never
known anyone who's worked on a Shark.  So I figured I'd check with this
group:  Has anyone here worked with one?  What was your experience with
it?

Just to give an idea of the type of environment, we've got two
Symmetrixes with remote synchronous replication for a percentage of the
storage.  We use RAID 0+1 on all the drives, and have about 35TB raw
between them.  We also use a CX700 with a mix of ATA and FC RAID 3 and
5 respectively for our lower end storage and backup to disk.  We have
four platforms: AIX, Sun, Celerra, and Windows, which  all add up to
about 50 servers on the SAN.

Let me know what you think!

Aaron

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[snip]

>
> I continue to talk trash with these guys, but, to be honest, I've never
> worked on a Shark, never worked anywhere that had a Shark, and never
> known anyone who's worked on a Shark.  So I figured I'd check with this
> group:  Has anyone here worked with one?  What was your experience with
> it?
>

[snip]

Well, I have installed many of them as well as storage from other vendors
(EMC, LSI,
Netapp, HP ...) for my customers over the last years. What kind of
experience do
you want to know?

Rene

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I guess I mostly curious about users' opinions about the boxes, and
what led them there:

Stability of the platform/microcode
IO and RAID processor Performance
Quality of IBM's support on the boxes
Redundancy/Quality of the components
Functionality of advanced features:
replication, data duplication (like TimeFinder),
growth of raid groups/stripe sets, etc.

Anecdotes are welcome (and taken w/ grain o' salt).  This is just an
informal survey...

Since you've worked with many platforms, which is your favorite?  why?
Thanks,
Aaron

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