Our new CIO definitely has a bias towards degrees. He's a bit old school, admittedly, but he's likely typical of CIOs in modern, mid-size and large-size corporate America.
Specifically, we had quite a time with a new and highly-qualified candidate for an admin position. He does not have a degree, but did have the inside track of being picked by our Systems Manager (long-time relationship). He was hired, though our CIO made a point of saying "you know, without a degree, you really limit your horizons."
So, those of us considering moving up through the ranks are considering degrees (at least, those of us that don't have them). We do have a goodly number of people who do have degrees, so we're even more in the minority.
And, I can attest to having a really hard time landing a job during the last search. I do think a big part of it was my lack of a degree.
Wasn't there an opposite article on Weezer regarding platinum sales even though they release most songs via mp3 on their site? Mody is a bright guy, but perception doesn't always jibe with numbers.
Personally, the "Pearl Jam effect" came from them making the same album three times. Though I grudgingly admit respect for Vedder's stance on arena ticket sales surcharges.
We've found that several IM clients will fall back to tunnel on port 80. In addition to blocking known ports, our network group added an MBAR to our Cisco routers to block IM traffic. It's an imperfect solution because it blocks other stuff, but with trial and error, we're where we need to be. It's an added benefit (read: double-edge sword) that the same corporate policy blocks streaming media in the same fashion.
As much as it bums me to say it, it is critical for us. We have 30+ remote sites that make business-critical connections over frame relay (64k-768k depending on the size of the remote facility). We just don't have bandwidth to burn on streaming media and IM. Heavy web surfing in a remote location can compromise the bandwidth.
I don't know there is any quality substitute for blocking based on packet analysis. Certainly, it's more than just ports in our case.
Hey, I'm not going all "PC" on y'all (pun intended), but instead of "redneck", think "your grandmother and/or your mother". I know Walmart is a popular hangout for the bumbles of the world, but they have a really long reach in terms of mass-market retail access. They are, for all intents, the Sears Roebuck of this generation. Everyone goes to Walmart at some point. If you want our favorite GPL operating system going to the masses, this is the way to make it happen.
Now, if Target would just do the same thing with a slightly upscale ($50 increase), neatly-designed case in the fashion of most of their homegrown goods, we'd really be in business.
I'd agree with the first post. Document your objections and the exploits. Give it to your boss. If he wants to CC everybody, that's his business.
It sounds like a political issue (know-nothings vs. know-it-alls... thank goodness I always consider myself a know-nothing... keeps an open mind). But, even a political issue does have a cost/benefits analysis. If you can put a price on fixing the issue (time, people, money), you make an even stronger case.
Also, if you do get nailed, you can point to the cost/benefits analysis to say "see, $5,000 then would have saved $25,000 in damages". On the other hand, in some cases, you'll end up on the other side of that equasion. If the cost to fix outweighs the potential damage, you put it to unbiased numbers.
You won't be seen as "chicken little" crying about the falling sky; you'll be a professional who bases the comments on a fiscal analysis of the risk. If your professional guess is unsupported by the findings, that's ok (and, let's be honest, you're almost certainly on the right side of the equasion here).
But, pointing to technical weaknesses won't help your case. It will make you a pain in the side of all parties concerned. They will cut off their heads to spite you (and, may already have done so, according to your details). Put it to dollars, document it and go to your next challenge.
This same discussion happened re: the moon landings. Gloom and doom, they said. But we are bombarded by Martian particles every day (moon particles too, as it were). The one thing of which we are fairly certain is that bacteria is very resilient, including surviving on meteors from Mars. It's, if you'll pardon the cavalier attitude, a non-issue.
Banning the reentry vehicle? Wouldn't it just be more melodramatic to consign the exlporers to Mars forever? NASA people get enough real drama already.
My contract with the broadcaster is my cable bill. I don't know how much an individual channel garners from the fee (if indeed it's anything at all), but I certainly owe them no more. Maybe Turner-wonk would prefer if I just watched the ads and didn't purchase any more Cartoon Network-related items?
In the dark, old days, I'd have to say I'd echo the comments of the designers quoted regarding adopting an OS, even if it has superior qualities. We'd wait until our service bureau or printer (when we did direct-to-plate) forced the upgrade issue on us. When that day comes for OS X, I'm sure the designers will find lots of creamy goodness in a more modern OS.
And, I can agree with the I-hate-Aqua camp, too. I don't personally hate Aqua, but Macs by and large are used for very specific tasks (even in the design community, you're heavily specialized in many cases). The traditional Mac users want some familiarity, particularly as one becomes used to having all the real estate of a 21-inch monitor for your QuarkXPress pages or detailed Illustrator vector image. I still recall that At Ease bullcrap from System 7 and the doofy rounded widgets in System 8 that took longer to render on older systems.
It's just like Itchy & Scratchy Industries president Roger Meyers Jr. said in that Simpsons episode...
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing... There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented. Kent Brockman: I see. Fascinating. Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Karl? The Crusades, for instance. Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went on for thirty years. Kent Brockman: And this was before cartoons were invented? Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Replace "cartoons" with "video games" and add a hearty "get bent" to the censors.
I'm an admitted Mac weasel from way back. I still have a Mac Classic II on my desk just for... *gulp*... appearance. It's one of the coolest forms I've ever seen. Working on it is like listening to Bach; it makes me feel like I'm doing better work.
And I know that all sounds lame. I know it isn't true, but Shiva H. Vishnu, I love those machines so.
I would liken the case modding (from the line about design being a big part of the price) to customizing Harleys. They're overpriced and not popular because of performance (not dissin' the Harleys, mind you). People pay premium prices just so they can pay someone else premium prices to make their Harley unique. Kinda fitting that one flag case mod made me think immediately of Easy Rider.
I don't know that this is particularly helpful, but the older Apple Portable (non-active) and Apple Powerbook active matrix displays worked pretty well in sunlight. I don't know how available they would be at the moment, so it's probably a matter of finding similar technology. That assumes you'd find them suitable for your application. I don't know what options you have if you really need color, though. Maybe this is one of those cases where the plasma displays were really sweet?
Though I think this might be an easy one... Napster was an easier bandwagon on which to hop, and really did have sort of a mix of phemomenon and fad (after all, p2p had been around way before, so it had to be part fad to make a difference). The record sales were up, in fact, for 1999 and 2000. I don't believe Napster was the only reason for the rise (see good U.S. economy) or the downfall (see everybody's economy in a bit of trouble).
True, Bearshare, Kazaa, etc soldier on, though none has a network the size of the old Napster one. A big part of the appeal had to be the breadth of the music that lived on Napster. Look at the OpenNAP servers still out there, and the list is considerably diminished. Ditto the beta of the next gen Napster.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't based on a formal study and deep research or an impassioned plea to violate copyrights. And the Napster star may have fallen anyway without legal action ("Napster... you still use that? It's not as cool as..."). But, I do believe what my pal said. If you're into Napster, you're into music. That had to translate into CD sales since copying music works has never been a real chore.
It's a hard truth for the recording industry to accept, but as a friend of mine said, "when you're into Napster, you're into music." I have to say I bought a few dozen CDs during the Napster era. I've purchased one since the downfall (and that was a gift). Here's hoping the artists get more joy out of the RIAA than ordinary users like us.
Saw a few at a reseller yesterday
on
iMac Shipping Delays
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmm... that might explain why, with it being a hot new model, there were quite a few on the shelf at the distribution center of a large reseller I happened to be touring yesterday. They had what looked like 4 of them on one of the burn-in tables (4 would be a lot, given that this was the only station where Macs did any serious burn-in time). I didn't even think about it being related to intentionally-delayed shipping.
Also, they looked a lot cooler before I saw one in person. They really do resemble a mid-70s industrial desk lamp. Hey, I'd take one in a heartbeat, but the cube was waaaaay sexier!
You might be looking more toward the at-home, small-shop virus scanning, so my comments might not apply, but here they are anyway:)
We use Trend Micro end-to-end. Officescan goes on the clients (Win95, 98, 2000, NT). ServerProtect goes on the servers (scan in+out or just one or the other). Scanmail runs on our Exchange servers. VirusWall will eventually go behind our firewall, particularly since they are a Cicso parter, and therefore allow only certain traffic to be filtered to the virus scanner inline. That's a big deal since your inline scanner can easily become a huge chokepoint (like McAfee... Network Associates is pretty clueless in this area).
A better option on the desktop would be PC-Cillin. Officescan works great, but the new patern files and engine updates are in the 4 MB area, which is pretty slow to move to our 40+ remote offices over the average and already stressed frame relay connections (256k in many cases). Officescan uses a centralized server to push the updates and record scan results, and it can really slow down a network at the worst time (during virus proliferation... McAfee is not clueless here since they only ship the update portion to their clients). PC-Cillin pulls just the new part of the pattern file, so it's more like 200k on average.
ServerProtect also runs from a central server (all of the consoles are web-based, requiring java). The update and reporting actions are similar, but it's not as big a hassle since bandwidth to them is not a problem. Scanmail updates directly from the internet, has options to scan smtp, mapi or both as well as block attachments by type.
Performance-wise, we're pretty happy with them. Scanmail adds the most overhead, but it is well worth the effort. We also had an unresolved issue with backup software (Veritas BackupExec) running amuck on one particular system during the nightly ServerProtect scan, but we think it was related to the install of that particular machine. Reporting could be a bit less cumbersome, but it's still useful.
Our solution wasn't cheap for a network our size, but all the players charge pretty much the same thing. Trend did miss Nimda until the second day after all the trouble, but Symantec and McAfee miss lots of other virii too (not to hear them tell it, but I'll attest to it), so you're in pretty much the same boat either way.
I'm only tackling the restores part of the question here... typically, speed or a lack thereof in restores is a function of your backup software. If I restore a library on one of my AS/400s (using IBM's OS/400 builtin backup utilities, which are not very bright), it takes a few hours to read the tape and seconds to restore it (single unit LTO). However, if I can give a tape id in addition to the library name, the restore takes seconds since the LTO is really very fast, particularly if it knows the tape segment where the file is stored.
I'd echo the move-to-RAID-0+1 statement wholeheartedly. You could change very little and still increase sustained performance. In my own testing (moving 1GB of small files and a 1GB file separately), I'm reducing the move time by about 30-percent. That's on a DG Clariion, not a Compaq array, so ymmv.
I don't claim to be an expert on fibre, but that speed seems slow. I don't know if the limitation is the array or the card, but it seems that would be the most promising way to eliminate the backlog. Sure, the 160MB/sec scsi controllers perform well, and that would be a fine upgrade. But 200MB/sec dual fibre connections (with failover support, hopefully) would be even better.
Little to add that hasn't already been said, but...
We are having an excellent experience with our SAN. It's fiber (fabric logon, not arbitrated loop), runs through Brocade Silkworms (dual, actually, for failover) to HP XP256 chassis (actually made by Hitachi and a competitor to EMC's almost as good Symmetrix). We run HP-UX and NT boxes from shared storage.
We don't, however, cluster so no one is accessing files from the same place. If we were, the locking would be handled by the application (notneeded for serving read-only html files, for example). But, your mileage may vary.
We also have a significant investment in SCSI-attached RAID arrays. My unscientific observation leads me to say the SAN access is generally faster along with much less wasted storage. It is more expensive, though, and can take quite a bit of fiddling to get the fabric logons to work.
I'm having a lot of success with my Adaptec 29xx (2940 for SE like CD or external SE device, 2944 for LVD) and 39xx series cards. We don't use anything else in any of our operating systems (unless they are built-in to a motherboard). Granted, I'm not stressing my systems 24 hours a day... more like a few hours spread out over a regular business day.
I'm sure there are plenty who will readily disagree, but I don't think I've found, end-to-end, better hardware for SCSI controllers. Sure, getting the AAA-133 RAID controllers to work can be a challenge, but we've been nothing but happy with the rest.
We also have a lot of success with Mylex RAID controllers on several critical production boxes, though those are not *nix machines (NT 4.0 SP6).
fwiw, we pulled the DPT cards we have and replaced them with Adaptecs.
We have Samba running on DGUX and HP-UX boxen for moving critical data, particularly stuff destined for our old ISAM database structure. We don't do a lot of fancy stuff (only basic user-authenticated shares), but we never have downtime issues.
Not only that, but Samba runs flawlessly on the two machines that are absolutely critical to our enterprise. I'd never be able to do that with NT (apps on one, file services on the other if the apps are business-critical).
And, speaking as a fairly senior NT guy, the biggest reason for the positive uptime the the underlying OS. As long as NT is tied so tightly tied to a display subsystem, uptime will suffer. That has improved in Win2k, but an enhancement of a "broken" philosophy isn't as good as a better philosophy.
Ironically, we do use NT-based machines for general file services, though that is not considered business-critical at my company. However, we have it on our project list to move that (as well as domain control and WINS) to Samba/CIFS (CIFS is cool if you are an HP-UX shop since you can purchase commercial support from a company easily recognized by your executive-types).
We replaced an accounting system written in business basic with ISAM data structures and running on DG legacy systems a few years ago with Peoplesoft and Informix running on HP-UX. Overnight processing on the custom business basic system ran in 90 minutes. The Peoplesoft solution, after months of tweaking, went from 36+ hours to 9 hours.
We still have plenty of programs that were written in the 70s and 80s with business basic that still form our enterprise backbone.
FreeBSD might be even easier on the older hardware. All you need is a couple of bott disks for a network install. Plus, XFCE is an option in the ports system. It does not support the range of hardware out of the box that the various Linux distros do (but it can support a lot with a bit of work), but I like it for actually getting work done.
XFCE... oh yes, XFCE. You can use GNOME stuff if you want, but it isn't neccesary. It is especially freindly to laptops and older low-Pentium-class hardware. I use it on high-end systems, too.
Actually, if my intellectual property memory serves, the McDonald (or MacDonald) clan holds a fair preexisting claim to the "McDonalds" name. There was a small restaurant somewhere in the UK that the fast food chain wanted shut down until the clan suggested they'd better not test the name ownership in court.
But, heck, that could all be a pretty good urban legend.
Slashdot Mirror
Our new CIO definitely has a bias towards degrees. He's a bit old school, admittedly, but he's likely typical of CIOs in modern, mid-size and large-size corporate America.
Specifically, we had quite a time with a new and highly-qualified candidate for an admin position. He does not have a degree, but did have the inside track of being picked by our Systems Manager (long-time relationship). He was hired, though our CIO made a point of saying "you know, without a degree, you really limit your horizons."
So, those of us considering moving up through the ranks are considering degrees (at least, those of us that don't have them). We do have a goodly number of people who do have degrees, so we're even more in the minority.
And, I can attest to having a really hard time landing a job during the last search. I do think a big part of it was my lack of a degree.
As always, your mileage may vary.
Wasn't there an opposite article on Weezer regarding platinum sales even though they release most songs via mp3 on their site? Mody is a bright guy, but perception doesn't always jibe with numbers.
Personally, the "Pearl Jam effect" came from them making the same album three times. Though I grudgingly admit respect for Vedder's stance on arena ticket sales surcharges.
We've found that several IM clients will fall back to tunnel on port 80. In addition to blocking known ports, our network group added an MBAR to our Cisco routers to block IM traffic. It's an imperfect solution because it blocks other stuff, but with trial and error, we're where we need to be. It's an added benefit (read: double-edge sword) that the same corporate policy blocks streaming media in the same fashion.
As much as it bums me to say it, it is critical for us. We have 30+ remote sites that make business-critical connections over frame relay (64k-768k depending on the size of the remote facility). We just don't have bandwidth to burn on streaming media and IM. Heavy web surfing in a remote location can compromise the bandwidth.
I don't know there is any quality substitute for blocking based on packet analysis. Certainly, it's more than just ports in our case.
Hey, I'm not going all "PC" on y'all (pun intended), but instead of "redneck", think "your grandmother and/or your mother". I know Walmart is a popular hangout for the bumbles of the world, but they have a really long reach in terms of mass-market retail access. They are, for all intents, the Sears Roebuck of this generation. Everyone goes to Walmart at some point. If you want our favorite GPL operating system going to the masses, this is the way to make it happen.
Now, if Target would just do the same thing with a slightly upscale ($50 increase), neatly-designed case in the fashion of most of their homegrown goods, we'd really be in business.
I'd agree with the first post. Document your objections and the exploits. Give it to your boss. If he wants to CC everybody, that's his business.
... thank goodness I always consider myself a know-nothing... keeps an open mind). But, even a political issue does have a cost/benefits analysis. If you can put a price on fixing the issue (time, people, money), you make an even stronger case.
It sounds like a political issue (know-nothings vs. know-it-alls
Also, if you do get nailed, you can point to the cost/benefits analysis to say "see, $5,000 then would have saved $25,000 in damages". On the other hand, in some cases, you'll end up on the other side of that equasion. If the cost to fix outweighs the potential damage, you put it to unbiased numbers.
You won't be seen as "chicken little" crying about the falling sky; you'll be a professional who bases the comments on a fiscal analysis of the risk. If your professional guess is unsupported by the findings, that's ok (and, let's be honest, you're almost certainly on the right side of the equasion here).
But, pointing to technical weaknesses won't help your case. It will make you a pain in the side of all parties concerned. They will cut off their heads to spite you (and, may already have done so, according to your details). Put it to dollars, document it and go to your next challenge.
This same discussion happened re: the moon landings. Gloom and doom, they said. But we are bombarded by Martian particles every day (moon particles too, as it were). The one thing of which we are fairly certain is that bacteria is very resilient, including surviving on meteors from Mars. It's, if you'll pardon the cavalier attitude, a non-issue.
Banning the reentry vehicle? Wouldn't it just be more melodramatic to consign the exlporers to Mars forever? NASA people get enough real drama already.
My contract with the broadcaster is my cable bill. I don't know how much an individual channel garners from the fee (if indeed it's anything at all), but I certainly owe them no more. Maybe Turner-wonk would prefer if I just watched the ads and didn't purchase any more Cartoon Network-related items?
...the only thing that separates Sun from Microsoft is market share.
In the dark, old days, I'd have to say I'd echo the comments of the designers quoted regarding adopting an OS, even if it has superior qualities. We'd wait until our service bureau or printer (when we did direct-to-plate) forced the upgrade issue on us. When that day comes for OS X, I'm sure the designers will find lots of creamy goodness in a more modern OS.
And, I can agree with the I-hate-Aqua camp, too. I don't personally hate Aqua, but Macs by and large are used for very specific tasks (even in the design community, you're heavily specialized in many cases). The traditional Mac users want some familiarity, particularly as one becomes used to having all the real estate of a 21-inch monitor for your QuarkXPress pages or detailed Illustrator vector image. I still recall that At Ease bullcrap from System 7 and the doofy rounded widgets in System 8 that took longer to render on older systems.
It's just like Itchy & Scratchy Industries president Roger Meyers Jr. said in that Simpsons episode...
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing... There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.
Kent Brockman: I see. Fascinating.
Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Karl? The Crusades, for instance. Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went on for thirty years.
Kent Brockman: And this was before cartoons were invented?
Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Replace "cartoons" with "video games" and add a hearty "get bent" to the censors.
I'm an admitted Mac weasel from way back. I still have a Mac Classic II on my desk just for... *gulp* ... appearance. It's one of the coolest forms I've ever seen. Working on it is like listening to Bach; it makes me feel like I'm doing better work.
And I know that all sounds lame. I know it isn't true, but Shiva H. Vishnu, I love those machines so.
I would liken the case modding (from the line about design being a big part of the price) to customizing Harleys. They're overpriced and not popular because of performance (not dissin' the Harleys, mind you). People pay premium prices just so they can pay someone else premium prices to make their Harley unique. Kinda fitting that one flag case mod made me think immediately of Easy Rider.
I don't know that this is particularly helpful, but the older Apple Portable (non-active) and Apple Powerbook active matrix displays worked pretty well in sunlight. I don't know how available they would be at the moment, so it's probably a matter of finding similar technology. That assumes you'd find them suitable for your application. I don't know what options you have if you really need color, though. Maybe this is one of those cases where the plasma displays were really sweet?
Hey, I ain't saying it's gospel! :)
Though I think this might be an easy one... Napster was an easier bandwagon on which to hop, and really did have sort of a mix of phemomenon and fad (after all, p2p had been around way before, so it had to be part fad to make a difference). The record sales were up, in fact, for 1999 and 2000. I don't believe Napster was the only reason for the rise (see good U.S. economy) or the downfall (see everybody's economy in a bit of trouble).
True, Bearshare, Kazaa, etc soldier on, though none has a network the size of the old Napster one. A big part of the appeal had to be the breadth of the music that lived on Napster. Look at the OpenNAP servers still out there, and the list is considerably diminished. Ditto the beta of the next gen Napster.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't based on a formal study and deep research or an impassioned plea to violate copyrights. And the Napster star may have fallen anyway without legal action ("Napster... you still use that? It's not as cool as..."). But, I do believe what my pal said. If you're into Napster, you're into music. That had to translate into CD sales since copying music works has never been a real chore.
It's a hard truth for the recording industry to accept, but as a friend of mine said, "when you're into Napster, you're into music." I have to say I bought a few dozen CDs during the Napster era. I've purchased one since the downfall (and that was a gift). Here's hoping the artists get more joy out of the RIAA than ordinary users like us.
Hmmm... that might explain why, with it being a hot new model, there were quite a few on the shelf at the distribution center of a large reseller I happened to be touring yesterday. They had what looked like 4 of them on one of the burn-in tables (4 would be a lot, given that this was the only station where Macs did any serious burn-in time). I didn't even think about it being related to intentionally-delayed shipping.
Also, they looked a lot cooler before I saw one in person. They really do resemble a mid-70s industrial desk lamp. Hey, I'd take one in a heartbeat, but the cube was waaaaay sexier!
You might be looking more toward the at-home, small-shop virus scanning, so my comments might not apply, but here they are anyway :)
We use Trend Micro end-to-end. Officescan goes on the clients (Win95, 98, 2000, NT). ServerProtect goes on the servers (scan in+out or just one or the other). Scanmail runs on our Exchange servers. VirusWall will eventually go behind our firewall, particularly since they are a Cicso parter, and therefore allow only certain traffic to be filtered to the virus scanner inline. That's a big deal since your inline scanner can easily become a huge chokepoint (like McAfee... Network Associates is pretty clueless in this area).
A better option on the desktop would be PC-Cillin. Officescan works great, but the new patern files and engine updates are in the 4 MB area, which is pretty slow to move to our 40+ remote offices over the average and already stressed frame relay connections (256k in many cases). Officescan uses a centralized server to push the updates and record scan results, and it can really slow down a network at the worst time (during virus proliferation... McAfee is not clueless here since they only ship the update portion to their clients). PC-Cillin pulls just the new part of the pattern file, so it's more like 200k on average.
ServerProtect also runs from a central server (all of the consoles are web-based, requiring java). The update and reporting actions are similar, but it's not as big a hassle since bandwidth to them is not a problem. Scanmail updates directly from the internet, has options to scan smtp, mapi or both as well as block attachments by type.
Performance-wise, we're pretty happy with them. Scanmail adds the most overhead, but it is well worth the effort. We also had an unresolved issue with backup software (Veritas BackupExec) running amuck on one particular system during the nightly ServerProtect scan, but we think it was related to the install of that particular machine. Reporting could be a bit less cumbersome, but it's still useful.
Our solution wasn't cheap for a network our size, but all the players charge pretty much the same thing. Trend did miss Nimda until the second day after all the trouble, but Symantec and McAfee miss lots of other virii too (not to hear them tell it, but I'll attest to it), so you're in pretty much the same boat either way.
I'm only tackling the restores part of the question here... typically, speed or a lack thereof in restores is a function of your backup software. If I restore a library on one of my AS/400s (using IBM's OS/400 builtin backup utilities, which are not very bright), it takes a few hours to read the tape and seconds to restore it (single unit LTO). However, if I can give a tape id in addition to the library name, the restore takes seconds since the LTO is really very fast, particularly if it knows the tape segment where the file is stored.
I'd echo the move-to-RAID-0+1 statement wholeheartedly. You could change very little and still increase sustained performance. In my own testing (moving 1GB of small files and a 1GB file separately), I'm reducing the move time by about 30-percent. That's on a DG Clariion, not a Compaq array, so ymmv.
I don't claim to be an expert on fibre, but that speed seems slow. I don't know if the limitation is the array or the card, but it seems that would be the most promising way to eliminate the backlog. Sure, the 160MB/sec scsi controllers perform well, and that would be a fine upgrade. But 200MB/sec dual fibre connections (with failover support, hopefully) would be even better.
Little to add that hasn't already been said, but...
We are having an excellent experience with our SAN. It's fiber (fabric logon, not arbitrated loop), runs through Brocade Silkworms (dual, actually, for failover) to HP XP256 chassis (actually made by Hitachi and a competitor to EMC's almost as good Symmetrix). We run HP-UX and NT boxes from shared storage.
We don't, however, cluster so no one is accessing files from the same place. If we were, the locking would be handled by the application (notneeded for serving read-only html files, for example). But, your mileage may vary.
We also have a significant investment in SCSI-attached RAID arrays. My unscientific observation leads me to say the SAN access is generally faster along with much less wasted storage. It is more expensive, though, and can take quite a bit of fiddling to get the fabric logons to work.
As always, your mileage may vary...
I'm having a lot of success with my Adaptec 29xx (2940 for SE like CD or external SE device, 2944 for LVD) and 39xx series cards. We don't use anything else in any of our operating systems (unless they are built-in to a motherboard). Granted, I'm not stressing my systems 24 hours a day... more like a few hours spread out over a regular business day.
I'm sure there are plenty who will readily disagree, but I don't think I've found, end-to-end, better hardware for SCSI controllers. Sure, getting the AAA-133 RAID controllers to work can be a challenge, but we've been nothing but happy with the rest.
We also have a lot of success with Mylex RAID controllers on several critical production boxes, though those are not *nix machines (NT 4.0 SP6).
fwiw, we pulled the DPT cards we have and replaced them with Adaptecs.
We have Samba running on DGUX and HP-UX boxen for moving critical data, particularly stuff destined for our old ISAM database structure. We don't do a lot of fancy stuff (only basic user-authenticated shares), but we never have downtime issues.
Not only that, but Samba runs flawlessly on the two machines that are absolutely critical to our enterprise. I'd never be able to do that with NT (apps on one, file services on the other if the apps are business-critical).
And, speaking as a fairly senior NT guy, the biggest reason for the positive uptime the the underlying OS. As long as NT is tied so tightly tied to a display subsystem, uptime will suffer. That has improved in Win2k, but an enhancement of a "broken" philosophy isn't as good as a better philosophy.
Ironically, we do use NT-based machines for general file services, though that is not considered business-critical at my company. However, we have it on our project list to move that (as well as domain control and WINS) to Samba/CIFS (CIFS is cool if you are an HP-UX shop since you can purchase commercial support from a company easily recognized by your executive-types).
We replaced an accounting system written in business basic with ISAM data structures and running on DG legacy systems a few years ago with Peoplesoft and Informix running on HP-UX. Overnight processing on the custom business basic system ran in 90 minutes. The Peoplesoft solution, after months of tweaking, went from 36+ hours to 9 hours.
We still have plenty of programs that were written in the 70s and 80s with business basic that still form our enterprise backbone.
And a quick addendum to what I just posted...
FreeBSD might be even easier on the older hardware. All you need is a couple of bott disks for a network install. Plus, XFCE is an option in the ports system. It does not support the range of hardware out of the box that the various Linux distros do (but it can support a lot with a bit of work), but I like it for actually getting work done.
XFCE... oh yes, XFCE. You can use GNOME stuff if you want, but it isn't neccesary. It is especially freindly to laptops and older low-Pentium-class hardware. I use it on high-end systems, too.
Actually, if my intellectual property memory serves, the McDonald (or MacDonald) clan holds a fair preexisting claim to the "McDonalds" name. There was a small restaurant somewhere in the UK that the fast food chain wanted shut down until the clan suggested they'd better not test the name ownership in court.
But, heck, that could all be a pretty good urban legend.