Once upon a time, I loved SCSI.

[Andrew W. Gaunt]

After I wrote this original post I too was curious about Auspex's 
disposition.
http://www.auspex.com morphs to http://www.glasshouse.com in my browser.
and leads to this:

> In June 2003, the company acquired the services and support business 
> of network attached storage pioneer Auspex Systems. These resources 
> have been incorporated into GlassHouse as the Customer Support 
> Services Group, serving Auspex support clients worldwide. Employees 
> are located in the US, Europe and Pacific Rim.

They were nice servers, the admin was simple. Unix OS with command line
utils and flat text config files. On the same plane with our new machines
which are Linux, GNU, LVM2, 3ware utils etc.

Our current NAS servers are from pogo linux. They are built of 
reasonably good
components and are well integrated as far as the hardware goes. Nothing 
that couldn't
be done from parts though. We buy from them mainly because they are on 
our approved
vendors list; to avoid  "help" purchasing people, we continue to use 
pogo. If we didn't
get so much "help" I'd be more inclined to simply buy parts and build my 
own thing.

Where pogo really falls down is the software install/recovery. When the 
boxes arrive,
they have a functioning OS with all the special utils and stuff they add 
which I presume
works well. What they don't provide (at least in a way that is 
functional) is the ability for
you to build the system the same way  yourself (could be handy should 
your system drive
get trashed). From what I can glean, they kickstart the boxes at their 
facilty and ship them
with CD media with labels like 'recovery disk.' Now those CD media 
labeled 'recovery
disk' might make one feel warm and fuzzy when they arrive, but, that 
turns to horror when
you actually try the poorly ducumented and non functioning procedure 
before putting the
machine into production. In conclusion, the lesson for me was; know my 
equipment, build
it myself, document how it's built and make it repeatable. I use 
kickstart  to do as much as
is reasonable.

Paul Lussier wrote:

>"Andrew W. Gaunt" <quantum at lucent.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Several years ago we replaced EMC/Auspex boxes which were much
>>more expensive. Additionally, the EMC/Auspex boxes were not maintainable
>>without a support contract (proprietary hardware/software). The support
>>contract alone cost us more annually than it did to purchase the new
>>self maintained boxes.  That was several yearsago and we've not
>>looked back.
>>    
>>
>
>Auspex, now there's a name I haven't heard in years!  Are they still
>around?  Did they get bought, or go under?  They were nice systems,
>but I was never convinced they were any faster than say, a NetApp.
>And for the price, you could get 2+ NetApps and still have some of
>your budget left :)
>  
>