Well fellow listers,

 The following is a summary of what happened during a test between IBM SSA
and EMC. Please read this in it's entirety.  Especially if you are thinking
of buying disk soon.  I will give you contact information and tell you all
about my experiences off list if you are interested.  Here you go.

Hi Forrest,

I would like to thank you for your support and interest in IBM SSA
technology and
its compatibility with the HP3000.  As you are aware, we went through a
fairly lengthy process to prove that 7133 SSA subsystems are an excellent
alternative to EMC disk when attaching to HP3000, and at a significant cost
savings as well.  The IBM 7133 offers performance, availability, and
reduced price over our competition.  The IBM 7133 gives you superior
performance due to its SSA loop architecture.  The SSA loop enables
multiple concurrent operations to occur in separate sections of the loop,
resulting in higher overall throughput..  The 7133 provides dual
full-duplex ports, redundant paths and hot swappable disk modules for high
availability and attachability.

Just to review our experience, IBM provided Reviewco with a proposal for
over 500 GB of 7133-020, SSA Disk.  This was approximately a 50% savings
over the competitive quote.  Because of that, we were invited to provide
loaner equipment in order to set up a test to prove our compatibility.
After ensuring that the system was correctly configured, the disk
immediately came up and ran flawlessly, providing greatly improved
performance.  We all agreed that this would be a very good solution for
Reviewco.

However, when Hewlett Packard learned of this situation, they claimed that
they would not support IBM disk on HP3000.  After going back and forth
several times, IBM was able to get concurrence from Hewlett Packard that
they would not only support this configuration, but that they would also
agree to allow IBM to take the position of general contractor, and they
would assume the role of subcontractor, providing maintenance and support
for both hardware and software.

This means that IBM can provide our customers with a single point of
contact for any problems that should arise, hardware, software; processor
or subsystem.  IBM would take the responsibility for the entire system.
This should alleviate any concerns clients might have regarding support
issues or "finger pointing".

As we saw during our test, the IBM 7133 disk provides a cost effective
alternative for HP3000 users who want to upgrade the performance,
reliability and availability of their current systems.

Thank you again, Forrest, for your support.  It was a pleasure working with
you and I look forward to our business relationship in the future.