Buying storage? Don't forget the cables...

It seems silly, but I'm writing this down because 'fool me twice' and all that.

So in the past year or so we've purchased two EqualLogic SANs from Dell.  Both times the reps (different reps...but that is another story) forgot to talk about/sell me cables (read: I forgot to ask), so we got a nice shiny SAN that we couldn't plug into anything.  You would think that I'd have learned from the first time...thankfully we had some spares, so wasn't a huge deal this time around, but it did mean this:

I have an 0.5m cable length requirement, and a 3m cable.  Now this is silly.  What's doubly annoying is that the impact on the budget, while not huge, is not insignificant (mostly because, you know...it wasn't included IN the budget).  Now that we're all 10gb storage network, the SFP+ Twinax cabling is pricey, even from non-OEM sources.  The 0.5m cable I need is $90 a pop! (MSRP, anyways)

There you go.  Buying storage?  The good ol' days of 'have ethernet cable, have storage' are gone - make sure you've sourced the correct cable at the correct length, and included it in the budget!

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