The Grumpy IT Admin

My company recently merged with another company, doubling the size and doubling the IT requirement. This has meant that our existing VMware platform with iSCSI EqualLogic was not really up to the task as it was beginning to creak anyway and doubling it to support more than 500-750 servers was unlikely to expand. Time to look at some grown up storage again.   Usual suspects, EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP. Key features required were expandability, replication, off host backups at remote site. There were a number of other minor things like making copies of live SQL databases between live and dev systems and storage tiering. Dell Compellant, HP EVA/3Par, EMC VNX, NetApp were all in the frame. Hardware wise all came in around the same prices, software wise it was different story for the replication and backup piece, the dell offering went off down the NetBackup route which is stupidly expensive and cost more than the hardware so that was first to go. HP went before we started as

It's quick it can allow you to have one cable to your monitor, it's quick and err that's about it. What's not good is that you can't get it on anything other than a Mac without paying out a good deal of money, even the cables are around c£30 (c$45), a recently acquired Drobo storage unit came with a TB and USB 3 ports but only a USB cable, surely this tells you something? There is no such thing as a TB expansion card that you put in to a computer. Intel seems to have missed the point. Proprietary standards always fail unless they offer something you can't get somewhere else and become ubiquitous before any competing standard can get a foot in, HDMI managed this trick but is slowly being replaced by Display Port, which is an open standard and has no licencing fees associated with it. USB took off simple because it was on every computer before it was even supported by the OS, every update has been backward compatible. Anyone in retail will tell that if you