The same federal government and Congress that allows regulatory capture in the financial industry, and a judicial branch that heavily favors deep-pocketed constituents to backstop such regulatory capture, has lost my trust as a fair standards arbiter in the food sector.

Only in user space on Linux, and on BSD some features (integrated iSCSI support for us) that are critical to some sites are missing. We just deployed a new Solaris (paid for the basic subscription support service to get the patches) server to run an inexpensive JBOD disk array that can expand to 384TB of raw disk space using 1TB drives, and ZFS on a paid-for Solaris was the only way to make that project come together on reliability, value, and performance. It is backed by an LTO4 tape library. I treat OpenSolaris as the rough equivalent to RedHat's Fedora; for certain key pieces of infrastructure, there is no substitute for paying up and getting the right technology to get the job done right. I don't see Oracle dumping Solaris, but I wouldn't be terribly put out if Oracle stopped active development for OpenSolaris, and only kept pushing regular updates from upstream with Solaris down to OpenSolaris. Now, if Oracle stopped supporting ZFS, I'd be miffed, but we would migrate over to a LVM and ext4 and live with that.

Payrolls are hardly technically challenging. By way of perspective, 30 years ago I...

Perhaps you haven't been in the business since then? Payroll systems today for large organizations are very complex because they often have to deal with tax jurisdictions around the world, and tax regulations have become quite a lot more complex since you worked at that computer bureau. In the university's case, simply accommodating visiting faculty can be a challenge. Then there is all the change control that surrounds tracking ever-changing tax laws. We haven't even begun to discuss benefits calculations, which are always related to payroll systems as many benefits impact what is deducted from a paycheck. The only payroll processes that are simple these days are the ones for very small businesses with a single locale and static benefits package, like your basic mom and pop restaurant down the street at the corner. Pretty much everyone else has multiple tax jurisdictions to deal with, especially with globalization pressures compelling many companies to do business around the world to survive.

This is why payroll processing companies like ADP are so popular with businesses; doing even multi-state payroll in-house is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. Pro tip: choose your payroll processor carefully, as they can skip with your tax deposits, and as long as the amount is below the FBI threshhold for caring about white collar crime, they can disappear with your funds with no repercussions. And the tax agencies don't care some scumbag just stole your tax deposits. That industry is completely unregulated, and is a scammer's wet dream come true as it is the perfect crime; businesses scammed like this are so panicked dealing with the now-pissed tax agencies they rarely have time/manpower/willpower to pursue the payroll processor. Now imagine what happens when the payroll processing takes place outside the country; good luck pursuing them in court overseas.

There was small-scale asset destruction when your toon died, but newbies quickly learned to leave their gear in town and stop bringing along all their gear when they went out leveling. Nothing new there, several games did that before Shadowbane. What was truly unique was what the Anonymous Coward posted below: the PvP scaled to GvG, NvN (nation vs. nation) and up, and the stakes got proportionally higher. Furthermore, beyond the individual-scale PvP, there wasn't a way to protect your assets other than fighting off other groups, and it led to some great fighting. EVE Online does this as well, but the setting is in space. I'm not aware of any other fantasy setting MMO that does this, though.

I'm an IBM Business Partner, not an IBM'er, so I don't know how timely Blue Pages is. Your Blue Pages record will display your chain of command all the way up to Palmisano, but with all the re-orgs this year, I don't know if IBM keeps the records updated.

The re-orgs have really hurt IBM; a lot of sales efforts stall out with a re-org and it causes Business Partners like me to scramble trying to reignite those opportunities, and confuses customers where the sales reps leave in a hurry. Only about 10% of the sales reps I work with actually perform a thorough hand-off. IBM's numbers for 2009 and 2010 are not going to look good if this keeps up, because their sales momentum is taking a beating.

maxtorman, thank you very much for explaining the technical details. We just ordered two 20-drive cases of the 1TB ES.2 model ST31000340NS drives from Provantage on December 31, 2008 for a new server build. After this news hit TechReport.com, TomsHardware.com, Slashdot, and started to spread through the news aggregators like Reddit and Digg this week, we went to check if this model was affected by our choice of SAS controller, and indeed it was. We freaked out after going through the Seagate KB and support discussion forums, and this morning we were starting to consider returning all the drives unopened to Provantage and ordering Western Digital RE3 units instead, as the server build hadn't started yet.

Your patient description of the underlying technical issues and responses to others' questions in Slashdot gave us enough confidence to hold off until next week Friday before deciding whether or not to return the drives, based upon what we see happening in the 1.5TB drive firmware issue. Possibly longer, if Provantage will let us exchange for Western Digitals after a month of holding onto the case of unopened Seagates, should that prove necessary. At this point, we can't tell if the SAS controller issue we have identified is related to the 320th log entry issue you described, but they sound related, so one possible question for you is if you are aware of any relation between the issues. We plan a tremendous lot of slack into our server build projects, so we would rather have Seagate get it right with this next firmware release than try to push a release out just for appearance's sake. The data on these drives would be configured for software-based 3x-RAID1, and redundantly backed up to LTO4 tape as well, so a loss of a drive's data is not a concern for us. However, time spent rectifying an issue is a big deal, and while we are patient with issues before the server build, but once it is built and in production, issues like this have a very adverse operational impact upon us.

We're planning a migration off of ext3 to zfs for our data, and we use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups, which provides a way to back up and restore individual files using a ZFS snapshot as a reference point. I would imagine other backup software support a similar feature. Is this the kind of external backup support you are talking about, or something more extensive?