Fri 30 May 2008
Marc from Dell posted a reply to my More Meetings post where I talked about the concern I have with the upgrade process with their Equallogic SAN. According to the sales rep we had out last week it takes on avg 15 seconds to upgrade the controllers inside their storage array. It first upgrades the “passive” controller then takes over as primary so it can upgrade the “active” controller. This process takes around 15 seconds and during the switch over all network access is disabled which i understand completely. What raised my and another admins brow was when we asked about data corruption during that upgrade window we were just told it won’t happen. He didn’t explain why it won’t happen or what in iSCSI is able to handle the lag in communication. He only said it won’t happen.
I’m sorry but I have had to eat my own words too many times in the past by putting faith in a product only to have it let us down and I just will not do that with my companies data. Just think if we all put blind faith into something a sales rep said and never questioned anything. We’d all be wearing Bill Gates t-shirts and blindly upgrading our desktops to the newest and latest from redmond.
And I was going to mention how immature I think it is that some companies so directly attack their competition instead of relying on facts, but then I remembered who is involved. Guess those in Texas just handle things differently.
4 Responses to “Bigger piles in the yard”
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May 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am
What you haven’t listened to the voices in your head and upgraded to Vista yet?
We are evaluating both of those solutions at my company as well.. We got the same spill with generic answers. I don’t like to see the two companies bash each other or getting into some sort of pissing contest. It just really leaves a sour taste in my mouth… Lay it all out there, what you can and can’t do, what advantages you have over others and admit if another company can do a particular issue better then yours or different. If I want a car salesman to spin the sales pitch, I will go buy a car.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Luke and ckb24,
What attacks are you referring to?
June 2nd, 2008 at 7:17 am
Just how one company bashes another. The bottom line is, you do some things well, the others do different things well. I want to know what makes you different from the competition in a positive way. Not a “they suck at this” type of speech.. If we didnt think both of you could get the job done, we wouldnt have brought both to the table to look at for our needs.. And dont be afraid to give an answer of “I don’t know”, the generic answers get old. I dont expect the sales people to know everything about all of the products, but at least bring in an engineer or someone that would to answer questions versus giving generic answers..
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
OK, you don’t want to hear a “they suck” speech. But do you want to know when the truth might be getting stretched a bit thin?
And what about comments from guys like Zirkdaddy, who is probably a Lefthand employee? (check the rollover on his name in the comment he left). What do you think of people that masquerade to be something other than they are?