Recently I order a few hard drives. Well actually I ordered a brand spanking new EMC VNX 5500 with 105 hard drives. So far all is well except for one little problem. Because of all the flooding over in Thailand it appears that EMC has run out of SATA hard drives.
You see they shipped the frame, the flash drives (EMC called them Enterprise Flash Disks or EFDs) and the fiber channel drives. But they also shipped two empty shelves. In those shelves are supposed to be 30 2TB Carrier 7200 RPM SATA hard drives. But thanks to the flooding and the destruction caused by the flooding apparently Carrier has run out of SATA drives (or they are at least getting damn close) so in the mean time I have two empty shelves sitting in my shiny new EMC array for the next two months while I wait for the disks to arrive.
This just goes to show that you need to keep an eye on the world weather when you plan on upgrading your systems. Because in this case an awful lot of rain half way around the world is keeping me from getting hard drives delivered to a data center in New Jersey. Now this flooding in Thailand happened quite a while ago, but it takes time to dig factories out, get the workers living in save conditions and get the factory retooled and up and running again. So until then Carrier will be running at a reduced build capacity and the world is requesting hard drives from them (and the other hard drive vendors as well) faster then they can produce the drives.
Now I'm sure that eventually Carrier and EMC will get the production back up to what we would consider to be their normal storage capabilities, but until then we wish good thoughts for the people of Thailand and we wait for our hard drives to be delivered.
