Top Ten Stupid Things/Outright Lies I heard on my SNW trip.

Well, it took me a week - you get a little behind when you take a week of vacation, then are out sick a week, then leave for SNW. But I finally got to it...Please understand: I heard a LOT of good things and saw a lot of verifiable claims at SNW, this is the worst, but there was more good...

Top Ten Stupid things/Outrageous Lies I heard on my SNW trip:

10. "Yes sir, we do have to confiscate your lighter."I flew back on day 1 of The Great Lighter Confiscation, and I have to wonder... If our idiot from Heathrow had tried to set off the bomb in his shoes with matches, would lighters be okay, and matches be getting confiscated?

9. "iSCSI is not scalable."Sorry if you only do FC, but this FUD will only keep you going for so long.

8. "FC SANs are dead."Sorry if you really want iSCSI to take off today, but our readers are not rushing to throw away their multi-million dollar SANs. Maybe when 10 GigE comes along, but there's still that darned "initial investment" thing.

7. Vendor: "Our iSCSI product outperforms FC"Don: "You mean if you use multiple switches, right?"Vendor: "Switches are non-blocking, we can do it with one GigE switch."Oh boy. I want this toy in the labs. They're perfectly wrong - it's still 1 Gig, and that 1 Gig has more overhead (the IP packet) than FC.

6. "NAS is dead."sigh. Okay, here's a Public Service Announcement for all vendors. Just because you don't make it doesn't mean it's dead, nor does it mean that it's not scalable.

5. "We don't see a market for SAS products."I'm sorry, I just thought I heard you say "We feel less options for our VARs, OEMs, and end customers is a good idea." Everyone else gets it, so why don't you?

4. "We don't see heterogeneous SANs in the field."This is not the first time I've heard this argument. You know why? Because for most combinations of heterogeneous switching I have to shut of half the functionality of your switch. If there was true interoperability between switch vendors, this wouldn't be a problem.

3. "We don't believe customers want replication."Right, they'd rather lose data, perhaps? Or stick with a backup window that is killing them? Our readers want it, so who are your customers?

2. "This product is the easiest storage product we've seen." This was an analyst quote that a vendor showed me about their product. My immediate response was "how many have they seen?" Goodness, there are more storage products every day, because this market is so hot at the moment. If I were that analyst, I wouldn't have spoken in an absolute like that. I really want this product in the lab to test this claim. I've seen some pretty darn easy storage products.1. "Tape is dead."Groan. This one has been going on for ever. You know what? Disks don't travel well. Remote replication assumes a fat pipe. D2D is good, and helps with restore times a LOT but it's not a silver bullet. People still want to move things to tape. Don't point me at your one customer that quit using tapes as "proof" that DR doesn't use tape any more. Finally, See #6.