Thank you to all who responded. While I did not get the information I was

looking for, competitive analysis info, I did receive some very good

information that will help in the decision. Below are just some of the

replies I received. Again thanks to all who took the time to respond.

I don't have any competitive analysis information but I do have several of

them and they

have performed well. The only real drawback is the fact that the unit has

only 1 controller so you have a single point of failure.

You might want to check with EMC who now owns clarion. I know they make

units much like the A1000.

Have you looked into the nStor's product line to see whether you can find

similar product from them. Their Web site is at www.nstor.com.

We bought an A1000 from SUN and then found we could get a better deal for a

similar product from Zzyzx (www.zzyzx.com). For an educational institution,

we bought an A1000 for $20k from for 10 18gig drives. From zzyzx we bought

a raid system for $14.5K with 10 18gig drive. This allows us to have

additional hot spares that we don't have on the A1000.

We have been using an A1000 for about a year, and are very happy with it.

There is one issue to be aware of however. The A1000 only has a single SCSI

controller. You cannot really dual port a single A1000.

Don't have any comparative information but we have been using an A1000 and

Raid Manager 6.0 for the past 3 - 4 months on a new E250. We have 12 18gb

disks and are running RAID 5 with one hot spare. So far no problems and it

has been very stable.

Sun's storage I am not impressed. It uses the "GUI raid manager".

And it is buggy. I recommend using Clariion product. Raid Power is

my reseller.

Roger Nason

Liberty Mutual

Technical Services - UNIX

(603)245-4417

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