I'm not sure what he meant by "too hot". Perhaps that was a nice way of saying the S-class is nearing retirement age. I don't see it listed on 3PARs products page anymore.
I personally am a tinkerer, in theory the 600gb drives should work just fine in the old hardware, if uts a plug and play environment. However, this is an Enterprise grade data system, and I think when it comes to delivering the promise of data integrity, it is permissable for a manufacturer to deny any assumption/expectation of "open hardware compatability" and limit support to limited "known to be good" parts list. I suspect thats what 3PAR does inside their Inserv OS by maintaining a table of supported drive models and firmware, and the images to flash firmware for those supported drives within the OS.
That said, it would require code/data changes to the old Inserv code (compiled for the S-class processors which are different than the new T series Intel based systems) and the standard slew of testing to validate the new drives and firmware work as intended with all the existing legacy components out there in the various possible combinations that may occur in the real world... in order to continue to guarantee the promite of data integrity.
Spot checking the EMC Clariion Disk and FLARE OE Matrix (attached) you can see that EMC never added support for 450gb drives to many of their older systems (CX200, CX400, CX600), and only supports the 500gb FC drive on 2 of their systems. The 600gb FC drive is not even listed as supported and this document is roughly 2 weeks old, January 6, 2011.
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The DMX1000, DMX2000, DMX3000 (comparable age wise to a S-class) only support up to 10k rpm 300gb FC disk. No 600gb option. It lists a 7.2k rpm 500 gb disk, but its unclear to me if thats native FC or sata. The same appears to be true for the IBM DS products from DS6800 thru DS8300.
I believe its an industry wide practice to not spend too much time/effort into refreshing code/firmware on old EOL platforms to stay up to date with modern spindle sizes.
You should be able to continue to reap the value of your S400 investment by adding more magazines and drive shelves to your existing system using supported drive types. How does scaling that compare to buying a new T400?
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