At my company, we use EMC. I don’t like them. Why?

• EMC stuff is just so expensive for what it does. We’re talking about an array, not a space shuttle, but just to get a decent sized one into your datacenter requires a budget approaching said space shuttle. Well. Maybe a wing.

• Don’t bother with the NAS equipment. The array controllers are OK but the NAS hardware is rubbish. Its overly complicated for what it needs to do, and requires an external linux Control Station (RedHat 7.2) which has a single internal disk and when it dies you can’t manage your NAS filesystems.

• Everything is Java. Nuff said.

• The CXx00 series arrays are pretty solid. Just don’t bother with ATA drives if you care about uptime. The little dirty secret with these arrays is that you cannot update the array online if you have an ATA tray connected to the system. Ugh. Talk about nasty surprises. And it takes them 4 hours to update the code. Um, we’re an ISP? We can’t have downtime? Hello? Is anyone listening?

• EMC’s Navisphere software sucks. Not just that its written in Java, but its badly designed. It has a tickbox labeled ‘disable foo’ where foo is some random feature that doesn’t belong in the control panel that you’re on.