Yes.  Someone else who gets it.  Thank you Ed.  Im sure many others do
too.  But when I try and explain why the suck, people just give me a
blank stare.

Example...  In ECC 5.2 on a DMX array, I would like to deprovision some
previously assigned LUNs from an old host.  But, how do I know they are
really ready to be deassigned and not in use by another host?  Because
if they are and I pull out the storage, its update resume time...

For a real life specific example, we recently had some storage that
although shows up in ECC as a mapped LUN, it shows as no host assigned.
Then we checked our spreadsheet and it said unassigned.  Then we checked
the actual database (repository as ECC calls it) and it said unassigned.
Well its time to unassign right?  As it turns out, the LUNs were
assigned/lun masked to a windows server, the windows team had added it
to a volume group but had not yet put a file system on this LUN.  So
therefore, even though there is an agent on the host in question, it
still doesn't show it as being assigned.  Called EMC and they say this
is the way Windows works, doesn't write LIF info or something until an
actual File System is written to the LUNs.  I say BS, even if that's
true EMC should know that and write code into the agent to report when
the LUNs have been masked or made a part of the volume group.

So now we do all of the following.
Check in ECC
Check our manual spreadsheet
Check the repository database
Check StorageScope (Storagescope saved us but I have seen it report
incorrectly too)

The end all be all check is to run an syminq from the host in question,
but if you don't know what host it is...?  And I could script this for
every Unix host, but harder to do on a windows host, or worse, a vmware
or VMS host...

I know this is a bit off topic of pur backups, but backups and storage
are so related, and if you mess this up it quickly turns into a nasty
restore issue.

Basic LUN Management when I buy a million dollar array and now EMC says,
oh SAN Advisor would probably fix that for another $50k per array.