Technology: Good, Bad and Ugly

Disclaimer: these observations are based upon my experiences.
And UGLY does not refer to aesthetics or appearance.
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Sonicwall CDP6080 - GOOD! [6/22/2009]
I've spent several weeks evaluating this product. The product is marketed on two levels; file-level backups and image system backups.
The file-level backups work well and the users ability to restore files is reasonably intuitive. The server application backups work well with SQL Server, MS Exchange and Active Directory. The image backups for servers works well - but for PCs, the image backup is sorely lacking.
Sonicwall uses a repackaged Acronis product and has neglected to implement the version which allows for a Workstation Universal Restore, even though it is available from Acronis.
My biggest issue with the product though is the lack of bandwidth throttling or backup scheduling for the agent. When you first install and start the agent, depending on how much data you select for backup, the CDP agent will consume a substantial amount of bandwidth. However, once the initial PC synchronization is done, the continuous file backups has very little impact on PC or network performance.
Overall, the product is good... But with a little more tweaking, it could be great.

Western Digital My Book Essential Edition - I attached it to a Windows XP Home SP2 PC. I shared the drive but all attempts failed with a message indicating a failure of permissions. The key part of the message, though, is "Not enough server storage is available to process this command". After a couple of hours of internet searching, I found the answer.... It is a matter of increasing the IRPStackSize - here is the regedit import:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters]
"IRPStackSize"=dword:00000015

Copy this regedit and save it as IRPStackSize.reg, then run this on your PC.

AVENTAIL EX-1500 SSL-VPN Appliance - VERY GOOD IN ITS DAY!
We replaced our Aventail box with a Sonicwall 2000 SSL-VPN Appliance a couple of years ago. We've been wrestling with what to do with the old Aventail box.....????? This has led me to download FreeNAS and OpenFiler. If your prospective NAS box is a standard off the shelf PC, I am sure that both will work fine. But, I had problems with both downloads. FreeNAS had several issues which stopped it from booting; I worked through these and found that it could not write to the USB stick as it touted. The problem is most likely because it cannot write to a single device when there are multiple USB ports. OpenFiler does not support USB sticks so that test ended quickly.
If anyone has had success re-allocating an Aventail appliance, please let me know.

DELL PE6850 - EXCELLENT!
All of the Dell Server hardware is very good. Over the years I have worked on Compaq, HP and IBM servers. For the most part, the Hot Swap drives never really worked in true Hot Swap mode. About a month ago, I had a drive failure on a Dell Poweredge 6850 running RAID5, the server logged the error. I set the drive to Offline, pulled the drive from the server with the OS still running, screwed a new drive into the carriage and inserted the drive into the server. The PERC controller almost immediately began rebuilding the drive.

D-Link G700 Wireless Access Point - VERY GOOD!
After years of installing strictly the Netgear WG102 Access Points, I recently encountered a D-Link G700. I like this product very much. I am very impressed by it's distance and strength in a dense office environment; it, by far, outperforms the Netgear WG102. [Note: while the WG102 is PoE capable, the G700 is not.]

LaCie 1u Rack-Mount Ethernet Disks - VERY GOOD!
Had the 1TB disk in play for more than 2 years and it has performed without failure. Recently installed the 2TB model also. Both are used to backup a server farm and therefore handle a lot of stress from multiple servers simultaneously.
UPDATE: The 1TB version recently stopped responding (after 2 years of constanst use). I spent several days corresponding with LaCie on this and never received an appropriate response. I did find several restore image files on their site though.
My system is the 4 Drive version and there is only one version which works:
LaCieEDdiskRestore-4HDD_5.0_no_pdf.iso
To apply the OS:
1. connect a monitor, keyboard and USB drive to the LaCie Disk
2. boot from drive with LaCieEDdiskRestore-4HDD_5.0_no_pdf.iso image
This image will...
format the first drive
create a base partition with the embedded Windows XP
then format the remaining drives

Netgear FVS124G VPN Routers - UGLY!
Even with the latest firmware, these routers frequently lose their configuration. Not reliable!

Netgear GSM7324 - High failure rate - BAD!
Because of its price point, we initially deployed many of these. Within 2 years, we had a 50% failure rate.

Companies that rely on user forums for customer support - BAD and UGLY!

Netgear WG102 Wireless Access Points - GOOD!
Only occasionally have issues. Overall a good product and good value; especially when paired with Netgear's unmanaged PoE switches.