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Another IPAC group had six Sun Fibre Channel (FC) arrays, each with 1.1TB of storage. "The Sun support was getting really expensive, so we switched to a third party," says Hacopians. But third-party support doesn't significantly lower the cost. "We were able to lower the cost only by reducing the number of machines we put under support," he says. The group decided to not support certain arrays used for noncritical storage.

Sun wanted the group back and offered a new deal; it would support each FC array for $1,000 per year per array. "We're really a Sun Solaris shop to a large extent," reports Hacopians. In the end, the Sun storage support was mixed in with IPAC's Sun server support, which further obscures the actual storage support cost.

This was first published in May 2007

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