Reply to post: I recently dealt with a company

I recently dealt with a company

That had purchased a mini-3PAR i.e. an 8200. The company had a budget that they were determined to stick to and fought mercilessly with the previous implementers. What they got was an implementation that HPE and the distributor made the client sign off on that it was totally not supported and anything that goes wrong is your own fault.

They had performance issues from day 1 despite being 100% SSD and took less than 12 months until they had capacity issues. They had a very demanding and large SQL workload that was killing the array with very large block sizes. I had access to the internal HPE sizing tool and even with dedupe and compaction turned off they would never have the required IOPs with what they had.

The client refused to accept culpability and all suggestions to remediate fell on deaf ears because they didn't like the price of the additional SSDs. They had an exchange server log blowout for failed backup reasons and they didn't have anywhere to go, space wise. It was quite pleasant seeing them go down in flames. Even then, they still didn't want to fix the problem, because money. They messed about for so long that HPE eventually canned the 480GB SSDs they used and the next step up in availability, was 2TB SSDs and they needed multiple to create the new RAID. Suddenly, remediation was at least twice as expensive because it was IOPs more than storage that they needed. HPE were really embarrassed with the bad PR this could bring them that they offered the drives at cost with near $0 implementation cost and they still wouldn't buy them, it was maddening. They had this hair-brained idea that because they were planning to move to Office 365, the Exchange system would go and they would save space/IOPs, but in the 12 months we dealt with them they hadn't even started. We eventually annulled the managed services agreement with respect to SAN management and performance because of their bad behaviour.

I do think the previous implementers should have walked away from the client and HPE should have refused to sell them the kit, but obviously commission distracted from the disaster waiting to happen.