Our new 3par storage mega-arrays at work are something else. They have some amazing hands-off features, and are extremely fast, but they also call home. They send the manufacturers statistics and apparently also our configuration information. It's a little disconcerting, but it does have one interesting advantage. Occasionally, they notice something is wrong before our NOC does:

From: Ken Hardin
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 10:01 PM
To: Unix System Administrators
Subject: Transfer overdue for 3PAR InServ

We received an alert from our monitoring system indicating it has not received a heartbeat file for over 4 hours from one of your 3PAR InServ storage servers (serial number [XXX], called nw-3par-02, in CT). The last time we heard from it was around 15:30 EDT (today, 4/9/05), and at about the same time there were network errors reported by the other InServ (S/N [XXX]). This probably indicates some type of network problem.