Re: R.A.I.D Boxes

Gerry Gilmore writes:

>Why won't the gentleman from Storage Computer post some specs or
>_something_ as to their "RAID 7".

Hi Gerry,

Let's look at the October 31 issue of Open Systems Today with the big story "Oracle Drops 'Misleading" Advertisement" -- British Agency's Complaint Spurs Action -- Database Maker's Ad Carried Questionable Performance Claims".

...Oracle has effectively withdrawn from benchmarking supervised by the widely-respected Transaction Processing Council..."There's no conflict there," said Ken Jacobs, vice president of product planning with Oracle in the U.S. "The numbers in the ad were more meaningful and less subject to misinterpretation than the TPC's. And the offenses were trivial."

London-based Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the ad was misleading in three respects:

1. The ad suggested Oracle 7 under Windows NT was used when in fact NetWare was used.
2. PC Magazine quotes were used to refer to a specific aspect of Oracle's performance on a specific test, when in fact they were general comments or referred to some other aspect or test.
3. The ad claimed superior performance on tests that were identical in name to, but different in nature from, tests actually won by Sybase.

"The advertisement was so blatantly unfair to all the vendors and deliberately misleading to all the readers, we felt we could not let it pass," said John Spiers, Sybase's marketing director for Northern Europe.

The similar US ads have also been discontinued.

This sort of thing is one reason why we find that organizations insist on running actual RAID performance tests themselves on their own configurations, at their own sites, with their own application software.

Mike Willett
Storage Computer Corp.
11 Riverside Street
Nashua, NH 03062
Tel. 603-880-3005 Received on Wed Nov 02 1994 - 18:20:14 CET