It’s been a busy couple of months. The house didn’t sell due to the slackening San Diego housing market, so we have taken it off the market and I have two new roommates. One of them is my successor at the Shipboard Computer Group, and the other is a Russian guy who is taking classes in accounting at UCSD. It’s nice to not have to be out of my house every weekend for open houses.

Today I finally got to take the Forklift certification class, now that I have nothing to do with loading out ships. Oh well, at least I can play around in factories or terrorize loading docks or something.

At work I was put in charge of purchasing a backup system. We took delivery of a software package called Atempo Time Navigator, and a 7 Terabyte Fiber-Channel-to-SATA RAID array system to put the backups on. The software works great, but the hardware (made by another vendor who I won’t name here) has been craptacular and just plain does not work.

Take for example the mounting rails for this product. It’s four rack units high, and full of 42 hard disks. It’s over 100 pounds, so it needs some sturdy rails. They sent us some nice rails made by General Devices, but the rails aren’t long enough to fit in our standard 26 inch deep rack. However extensions are available from General Devices to make them fit.

The company that made the RAID array had another solution. Here’s what they sent:

The big grey thing is a General Devices solid bearing rack mount rail, rated to 175 pounds capacity, and designed to hold up a 4U device. The silver thing is a generic El-cheapo rail extension for a 1U rail kit that is probably designed for maybe 75 pounds. In any event, the holes just don’t line up - there is no way that the little cheap extension could mount up to that rail and be capable of securely supporting the huge disk array.

Surely they sent the wrong rail extensions. This wouldn’t suprise me since they didn’t bother with a packing list when they shipped the entire pallette containing the various parts of the $26000 disk array in the first place. Befuddled, I emailed the vendor.

Here’s the response I got:

Geoff,
Take a look at this photo. This is how the rails should be connected.
Give me a call if you want to discuss.
Donna

Are you kidding me? Jam two screws into a slot that’s designed for one screw, thus concentrating the entire load on a small point, and lose all adjustability in the process? You’re damn right I want to discuss.

I consulted my Newark catalog, and I found the correct extension pieces for those rails to allow them to fit a 26-inch deep rack and retain their 175 pount load capacity. Total cost: $13.08.

The whole experience with this particular manufacturer has been like this - the RAID array doesn’t properly handle failed or removed disks; the controller claims to support SNMP but doesn’t; the log messages are nearly useless; setting up the controller sticks me into Java-applet hell, and requires a web browser - no serial management; and to top it all off, the controller can’t even accurately tell me what disk failed.

So next week, I get to pack it all up and ship it back. Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of a three week lead time from another manufacturer, but their stuff is said to actually work.