US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems

WHEN WE BROKE the story about Core 2 marchitecture problems with RAID configurations here, one of the things that interested us the most is the open question: RAID for Conroe isn't much of a deal, but is it a problem with the aarchitecture and could Woodcrest suffer from the same problems?

The answer was surprising and came far sooner than we'd expect. We have learned that the policy of Government Accountability Office (GAO), is very simple: all of systems have to pass a mandatory four-month operational test before any final contracts are awarded.

WoodCrest systems were delivered for an evaluation for one of the US government departments, and it all ended up in tears, with Woodcrest being rejected in the first round of trials. The reason was that there were severe problems when Woodcrest was paired with a 1E RAID field when using IBM ServeRAID controllers. The problems didn't occur just in benchmarking, it was the every-day usage model that produced unexpected errors.

Worse of all, several problematic situations occurred during the trial period and Intel was heavily criticised in internal memos, all ending up in a really unexpected manner. Since the company has allegedly been aware of the problems and didn't responded in a timely manner, the supply contract was then lost and awarded to a different product coming from a competing company, which passed the field test with flying colours. µ