I need some help from this group.  I have a client who is considering the
purchase of an EMC Symetrix system, the problem is justifying the expense.
The current environment is one HP3000 949 system with 12 disks of varying
sizes (1.x, 2, and 4 gig), one Novell Server, and two HP NT Servers.  They
anticipate moving everything off the 3000 and on to the NT boxes :-(
during the next 3 - 4 years.  But they need more disk space on the 3000 in
the meantime.  The inexpensive ($27,000) short-term solution is to replace
the non 4 gig disk drives with 4 gig ones (it would improve performance
plus they are out of space for adding new drives).  The company has only
been down for disk problems (twice for a day each time) in the last 5
years.  They do not run mission critical systems and figured it would cost
approximately $30,000/day to be down.

With the information I have given you, I would appreciate any help the
group can give me in justifying the expenditure of over 10 times the cost
of the "throw-away" disk drives.  We have great justification from EMC, HP,
and OESC, but the client would like unbiased opinions.

To save bandwidth, if people would respond to me privately, I will
summarize the results and post them to the list to help others in the future.

TIA

Judy