XServe RAID - No longer available?

[Scott Lewis]

On Feb 19, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Brett Dikeman wrote:

> Ugh.  They're about 1-2 steps from the bottom of the barrel in the
> RAID controller market; I have no experience with their disk array
> units, but given how bad support and drivers were for the controllers,
> this isn't encouraging.  There had to have been someone better to go
> with...

Promise isn't bad on the lower end of the scale. I had the occasion to  
use a couple of them at a client that was very much cash strapped. If  
this is similar to the cabinet I used, drivers don't come into play.  
The situation I ran into was a client with a cheap budget, and an  
older app running SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 specifically (very old, and for  
a variety of reasons they couldn't upgrade as it was the last version  
THIS application could run on). The problem I was finding in upgrading  
their server hardware after a failure was driver support.

The Promise boxes had 16 SATA drive bays (hot swap), and presented two  
Ultra SCSI interfaces to the server. All RAID was built in, so you did  
not need a RAID controller, you could telnet to the Promise box and  
configure LUNs internally, but to the server, it looked like a regular  
SCSI connection. This allowed my client to use a cheap Adaptec SCSI  
adapter, that was supported by this very old SCO OS.

For the price, is performed extremely well. It was also nice to be  
able to use off the shelf SATA drives (and presumably SAS drives in  
their SAS version), intsalling them into the Promise carriers. Compare  
to many "top tier" brands, where you pay a huge premium for the same  
drive.

Ever compare the price of a Seagate Fibre Channel drive versus what  
EMC charges for their "version"?