Well that's not a good reason to abandon your promises and customers! This is very reminiscent of how the iSCSI to iSCSI-R3 *upgrade* was done. There was no upgrade. You guys left your customers to fend for themselves..

I just completed several weeks worth of effort to get my company onto iSCSI-R3 because I Open-E had promised failover for R3. I had to migrate data we had on a SQL cluster to a standalone system. I had to migrate virtual machines to a temporary dss-lite server. I had backup all of our backup-to-disk files to tape and suspend backups for a couple of days.. Now you tell me there is not failover for R3 because DSS sales have increased?

DSS is a great product. But the problem is that I don't need CIFS, NFS and all the other stuff in it. If you guys would bite the bullet and provide an option for users to install software like a a backup agent on to the box, then I would see some real benefits there. By not supporting the latest backup software (especially on the Symantec front) you are forcing your customers to stay behind. Because of this, if I need CIFS, i'd much rather stick CIFS head and back that off of an R3 data store because I can install a Symantec Backup Agent on it...

I am very disappointed. I bet in a few weeks you guys will discontinue iSCSI-R3 for the same reason..