And then suddenly, I noticed something incredibly fishy.  In addition to being a CLARiiON only solution, RecoverPoint/SE also only supports Windows. (My reference material was outdated… RPSE apparently supports most major OSes now, my apologies)

It make sense that SMB shops used to run only Windows and CLARiiONs, so the “Value Edition” of RecoverPoint supports that particular combination.  But SMB shops nowadays are venturing out to FOSS solutions such as LAMP based Alfresco to save some $. But if that translates to having to fork over a lot more money for the RecoverPoint “Deluxe Version”, it’d probably make SMBs look into some other storage vendors with more FOSS friendly price quotes. (However, RPSE does only limit you to CLARiiON-only storage, so for those wanting to save money by using less expensive boxes from a competing vendor, EMC will make you pony up for the full veresion of RP) After all, not everyone needs a Mercedes C class when a Toyota/Honda/Mazda works just fine   Remember, Linux is your friend.

Curiously, HDS is the only big 3 vendors not listed, mainly because I’ve NEVER been able to get hold of their sales force.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve lately been concentrating on the public sector, where HDS had not been paying too much attention. Whenever I tried to call the fed sales number on the HDS site, it either goes directly to a voicemail box or answered by some receptionist who redirects me to a voicemail box. Either case, I’ve never gotten call-backs.

Initially I just had some unlucky time reaching HDS sales, but after talking to a few storage pros in the sector, I realized the mutual concerns about HDS’s responsiveness on both sales and tech support (post-sales) for the public sector.

HDS.. please wake up! EMC had already stolen your market dominance. Seeing IBM is completely losing the battle on the high end monolith storage devices, and that not many tier-1 buyer taking NetApp’s pseudo high-end FAS6080 seriously, I’m afraid if this trend continues, I can only recommend EMC SYMMs to my customers with Tier-1 needs.
I’ve heard so much about HDS’ innovation and technology (not to mention the user friendliness of their boxens, compared to the SYMMs) and I really hate to see the aforementioned scenario from happening.

I really didn’t pay much attention to them since I got sidetracked by other projects that took me away from the storage group.  After I resumed working with the storage folks, I found out the management interfaces are now dropping out of network sporadically, and the only way to get it back online would be to cycle the disk controller where the management interface is .. OUCH!
Obviously the clients, especially the management levels aren’t happy ( Those who did not support venturing out of EMC solutions and the EMC onsite reps were thrilled … )

Our IBM rep had recommended firmware upgrades, setting the interface to 10 auto neg off , half/full duplex, but none of these had helped.

I’ve seen some pretty big DS4000 series installation at some other sites but I’ve never seen any controller with management interface that drops dead so easily, even after multiple attempts of firmware upgrades. This should never happen on a storage system, regardless whether it’s enterprise class or SMB class!  I can tolerate my Linksys router at home going belly-up every now and then, but a storage controller should never do that.