 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
Contents 
Introduction
A changing market
The appliance-making appliance
Do they really scale?
The ease-of-use myth
Walking the appliance road
Taking a holiday from spam
What about the disks? |
|
||
|
|
||||
|
|
||||
Storage experts recommend regular replacement of disk and tape devices, generally once they reach the end of their warranty.
"If a hard drive has a three-year warranty, it probably has a three-year life-cycle," Guy Riddle, of CBL Data Recovery, a company that restores data from damaged storage media, says.
"If you plan to keep a three-year-old device in service, I recommend replacing its hard drive." Mike Sparks of tape specialist Quantum makes similar recommendations.
Network Appliance's Steve Bracken feels differently. "We would not tell a customer to swap out their disk drives because they are out of warranty [even though] the most common reason for breakages [in our appliances] is disk drives and fans. We plan for that using redundant architecture,"he says. The company also offers a slick services organisation.
"Enterprise customers want two-hour response times for on-site support," he says. "To enable that, you need an alerting process."
"Our appliances automatically send e-mails to our support team as soon as anything goes awry. In the USA we can even arrange to have products shipped to end-users without human intervention."
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
Click here for subscription information.
