Flip flopping like a circus clown on crystal meth Alex McDonald takes a moment to load both barrels and discharge the contents into his own feet.
He writes an entire blog post trying to justify the fact that NetApp's VTL only offers single parity protection (Every EMC Disk Library shipping and which has shipped for god knows how long runs RAID 6 by default), while still trying to sing the corporate song about how evil single parity protection is.
We've read him say Single Parity protection is deadly for your data but now it's suddenly okay for the data used for operational backup and recovery.
Instead of wasting two years trying to get De-Dup on the VTL you might have taken your own advice and got RAID-DP running on it first. Converging GX and OnTap Classic is obviously burning through development resources. Something had to give, the NetApp VTL appears to be one of the non-critical products and has suffered for it. We'll see what else has been starved of development resources as time passes.
Now if NetApp offered RAID 1 or RAID 1/0 (They don't) I'm sure he'd be justifying those in certain situations too but we all play the cards we're dealt now don't we?
This is why NetApp will be the last vendor to add double parity protection to their VTL product so expect the hand waving and double talk to continue for a while yet.
Alex, dragging me into this was an amateur hour move. I'd gladly have done my laundry while yourself and Waterhouse went at it but having been travelling for the past two weeks I plan on working from home for the near future so that means I'll make time for you. Count on it.
I dub thee Footbullet Man, it goes a long way to explain all those holes in your socks which you were lamenting earlier. :-D
