Speaking of Centera complaints, can anyone tell me how to migrate data off to another vendor’s SAN box or if that’s even possible? I don’t want to hijack this thread, but if anyone can just point me in the right direction or email me some links it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much,
MBB
exit311@hotmail.com

I am sorry if your reading of this blog has led you to the conclusion that I (1) ignore factual evidence or (2) provide a biased account of EMC input. You can draw whatever you want from the blog, I guess. As for the input from EMC, it hasn’t happened. You are misinformed.

With the exception of a couple of chats with David Black, for whom I have enormous respect by the way, I have not heard one peep from EMC except via their bloggers who always put ad hominem attacks ahead of answers, then do not address factual issues at all.

If you see the most current blog, I have provided the world with the link you offered to the paper supposedly justifying EMC’s claim that they are “compliance certified.” The EMC sponsored paper from Cohassett explicitly states that they have never seen or deployed a Centera, that their opinion is based on EMC oral input and collaterals alone, and that nothing they say should be regarded as legal advice viz compliance. When I criticize this as insufficient to justify the vendor’s claim that their product has been certified by a government entity, is it spin? I guess in your view it must be, but not in the view of hundreds of thousands of readers of this blog (or why would they keep coming back?)

Your opinion is yours, and there are a lot of other blogs you can visit if you find this one biased against your preferred vendor.

I have invited EMC to clear the air regarding the statements of the “misguided 10%” and will wait for them to do so. So far, I have only the numbers of analysts to describe shipment volumes and only parabalistic and second hand information about both customer satisfaction and issues.

IT Pro magazine’s award is also not a compelling reason to buy a product. Never has been. I was let go from Byte and Switch a while back for publishing the email chatter between editors regarding their nascent awards program. My impression of most editorial awards is that they tend to go to big advertisers as often as they do to great products.

Since you are a big Centera fan, why not ask the folks at EMC to join our quest for accuracy — truth, justice and the American way — and to respond to the questions that have been put here directly. Unless you are on the payroll and can address them directly?

By the way, readers of Window’s IT Pro Magazine gave Centera the award for the best Enterprise Backup/Recovery/Archive Hardware product last year. I don’t think those kind of reader’s choice awards get handed out to bad products.

Finally, you mention that “compliance certified” is marketing foo. A cursury review of EMC’s website leads to this 3rd party link that details the SEC17a-4(f) compliance that EMC’s “foo” is based on:
Cohasset Report.

Thanks for the feedback. But market share numbers are pure BS. We are not questioning how many folks have deployed Centeras, but rather how many regret it now or will in the future. If the issues cited here and in the other post where you put an identical comment are any indication, Centera has issues that mitigate its value proposition.

Unfortunately, a lot of adoption appears predicated on exactly the basis that you are suggesting: go with the flow. I want to make sure that folks don’t regret their decisions later.

Since you are so pro Centera, it seems, how about encouraging EMC to respond to the most recent post, which asks what improvements have been made to the product or for explanations of the reality behind the marketing foo the company is using to sell it (“compliance certified”).

Thanks for the input.

EMC owns the majority of the Content Addressable Storage market share at 94%.
- Over 400 ISV’s see the value of and have invested the resources to create API’s for archiving directly to Centera
- As of Centera’s 5 yr anniversary in April ’07, EMC had more than 3500 Centera customers, including the top 20 companies on the Fortune 500. These clients were storing more than 150 PB of info on Centera.

I’m not saying that your support issues aren’t legitimate, but you gentlemen appear to be in the vast minority.