Review: iSCSI SAN Server shootout

Support/Services hard (impossible?) to evaluate in a magazine teBy Joel Snyder on August 6, 2008, 12:22 pmFrank: Fujitsu didn't really show up on our radar of iSCSI vendors. We ended up inviting 30 different vendors that were identified as key participants. I don't know if Fujitsu keeps a low profile in the US or whether they are a newcomer, but they haven't really hit the news here very much. Thanks for the comment on the performance explanation. As a commenter above noted, we didn't really want to make this all about performance, so that was a pretty small part of the big picture. I wrote, "there is no bigger can of worms..." So I wanted to discourage people from trying to micro-analyze the performance results. I was really looking for validation of the basic idea of iSCSI versus application mix versus internal drives versus fiber channel, rather than a super-detailed performance test. Just picking one scenario (like Exchange) could actually be a Master's thesis in itself to really understand the issues. And, of course, a lot of this will be very dependent on the settings you pick and the drives and the RAID level etc. You could optimize a lot. I was looking for broad brush strokes to get validation on basic answers to basic questions. I agree on the support question as being relevant, but it turns out to be almost impossible for magazines like Network World to actually evaluate customer support. Often we are not treated like normal customers because of the short term of our evaluation. And if we are (which is hard to tell--often times "the fix is in"), anecdotal information based on one or two support calls doesn't seem to be a good way to evaluate customer support. Generally, I like to think of the work we do here as a huge starting point for someone to do their own evaluation. Anyone depending on us for EVERY bit of data is really not doing their job and asking for trouble. Hopefully we can give you a boost on your own evaluations, and help identify areas to look at, in addition to obvious things that you can see for yourself (like pricing, which you don't really need our opinion on, since you can draw your own conclusions) or evaluate for yourself (like technical support, which might depend on how technical you are or the kinds of problems you are running into). Joel Snyder