Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> writes:
> [ ... ] but gave
> up pretty quickly when we found out that this gives massive headaches
> when people started using every disk type under then sun behind our
> raid controllers. With the quality (ugh) of disk firmware out there
> is was a support nightmare.

Is that why they did it?  It's too bad you guys couldn't just say "we
don't support that."

What it did for at least some customers, e.g. the group that I worked
with at CMU, was cause them to look to other possible solutions for
storage management.

We used to use lots of SW shelves filled with canisters filled with
'random' disks (i.e. purchased empty canisters, put our own disks in
them), without the Digital RAID controllers.  We used a bunch of
KZTSA/KZPSA adapters to drive them, and raidframe running on/in DUh or
just accessed them as independent drives (or via the port of ccd to
DUh that I did).

When DEC stopped selling the empty canisters, the future became 'up in
the air'.  It was ridiculous to pay DEC markup for (presumably
StorageWorks RAID-qualified, now that you mention it) drives, when
what we wanted was a bunch of disks in a kick-butt form factor...





cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.