What makes software great

I intended to whine about OS X and bundles, but as one of our mail servers dumped earlier today, I'll write about that instead.

One of the softwares we put a great deal in is IBM SAN FS. As is it a proprietary, closed product, I don't have a clue as to the code quality, or the development model. Or lots of other things that influence the quality of the overall product.

What I do know is that the support team is truly excellent, which compensates for the closedness of the product, something very rare in my book.

We've had (and continue to have) some issues, but no matter what cluster file system we'd chosen, I'm rather convinced we'd be a sort of test lab, and while I'd personally prefer at least being able to find and fix errors ourselves, paying someone who knows the code base to fix errors is a much smarter thing to do when trying ourselves (and this is the same for open and closed products of this magnitude).