There is exactly zero evidence that the US or EU played any part in the Maiden movement. If there is I challenge you to provide it.

There are two sides to this story:
1. The Russian side (what you're repeating, partially)
2. The truth

We in the west have a legitimate free press. It may be imperfect, it may be incompetent, but it's legitimately free to report what it wants and no single government has any controls to stop it. As long as *somebody* is paying attention the true story WILL get out eventually. Russia none of this is the case. The Russian government tolerates a domestic free press up until the point they do something they don't like. Then they make up some BS excuse to arr

Besides the obvious backup power, cooling, environmental stuff mentioned above....

1. Expandability.. how much rack/cage space is available nearby? Get a right of refusal on any empty space near your stuff if you can.
2. Power max per rack, can you get enough for SAN's, blades etc
3. Remote hands availability/skills/costs (really want to make a trip to the datacenter to replace dead hard drives? No. Do the employees know enough to do *limited* work for you)
4. 24/7 access, near employees if a physical presence is required
5. What sort of racks do they have? Can you buy your own?
6. Storage space. Need 100 servers shipped but don't have racks yet? Need to keep spare hardware on hand? Do they have room keep that for you?
7. How many/what carriers do they offer? How is access delivered? What does their network look like?
8. Do they have spare tools/network cables/misc parts. Can they order stuff for you, or is there some place nearby you can pick things up if needed in a hurry?
9. How many employees can you get access for?
10. Do they have a crash cart? Comfortable place to work? Wifi or other forms of internet access available?

First of all... almost nobody sells RAID 6 devices. I'm aware of only one company that does and it's not Promise. It's an odd ball configuration and I can't see where it would be all that useful. The common RAID configurations are 0, 1, 5, 0+1, 10, and 50.

Second Promise can never be considered a "nice" controller. It works, it's fairly cheap, but it's consumer grade stuff.

I wouldn't bother with a cheap RAID controller. Go with md raid in Linux. It's free, you never have to worry about finding the same controller again if the one you have dies, performance is decent (almost always better then cheap RAID cards), and it works really well all around. You might need a PATA or SATA controller to add more drives but those are cheap. High end stuff where performance is critical you get a high end RAID card.