jmg90

LSI controllers (adapter cards really no better) for VMS Alpha used to go for a couple thousand list for a retail sub 500 dollar part lavishly upgraded with some firmware that ensured the margins remained as high as the system clock on our ES45s. Fifteen years elapsed before we got the same bandwidth inside a Xeon.... I've still got the above mentioned dual 3.GHz boxen in archive because after that failure we copied all the internal data and mothballed them in case. Furloughed a office lot of twenty thousand dollars workstations because of a shoddy poxy consumer grade aic we were probably missold in the first place has we not had the full pr moves made on us to forget that... NDA expired years ago and only said we wouldn't be beastly to Dell who have been transformed since then the better imo though I am still not buying

Somehow storage creates the most intriguing narratives - maybe we collectively can most everyone appreciate losing or having data at risk, while otter arcana can't quite find the same empathy. Anyway...

In 05 Dell sold me a workstation and internal RAID array that suffered a drive fault requiring replacement and rebuild. Unfortunately the engineer who was handholding me through the steps just to make the changes under our support conditions of the job being theirs and otherwise we left alone, told me it was a LSI card and not a Adaptek installed. This was a very entry level card and the only such card I've experience of. (Accustomed to the luxury of the high end) So I had to take him on his assertion it really was a LSI OEM PERC controller. Erm, not exactly. I learned this when a second connector dislocated and I blithely yanked and reseated U32PSCSI ribbon neatly and promptly as I imagine anyone would. Only the PERC was Adaptek and not LSI and for reasons my recall may be protecting me from* failed the second drive in the R10 array.

I vowed to never run any hardware RAID again and I have maintained my resolution until last month, if specifying a rack of dedicated storage counts for proprietary hardware in equivalece of black box opacity.

I should have written my experiences and blogged them because I took this loss of the subsystem so badly I became obsessive about learning first how to reconstruct the borked array from raw disk, a pleasure indescribable in polite company, and carried on until I was holding forth in charge of a budget for storage space in my dreams I never imagined presiding over. Every which way I believe only in software control of stores. I'm a true disciple to the cause. This r as rack of proprietary storage hardware only got its PO after the methods of code escrow had been thrashed to death in the final thrills of fall and last winter. (Incidentally the outside legal lead wrote me privately afterwards and pondered out loud whether the escrow didn't create a backdoor kind of vendor lockup because of the potential for contaminating employees with IP during emergency contingencies operating. Thanks Buddy! I'm not sounding like it but I'm actually grateful for that consideration if only because it sounds good for avoiding any repetition of the process just endured. It's a dual licensed codebase but being on the commercial code and the open code trailing in develop... I'd love to see what eg DDN routines are like I'm absolutely sure eager audience awaits publications like that.

Surely the lock down must have awoken the industry to the needs of self sufficient repair and diagnosis.