[BBLISA] Re: storevault / netapp

[seph]

Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> writes:

> So what is missing?

With the caveat that this is from ~1.5 years ago, and they've
certainly bumped the version since then....

  Unable to have a volume with both nfs and cifs exports

  A weird and somewhat crippled volume model. On full ontap I was
  happily creating "flex volumes" and segregating my data like
  that. The storevault wanted me to use the older style of having a
  single volume with quoted subdirectories. Lame.

  competent tech support. I really can't stress how bad storevault's
  is.

  It has two gigabit interface, that *cannot* be bonded.

  No upgrade path.

My conclusion then, was that it was its nfsd was solid, and that all
in all it was reasonable for its price. These days, I feel more
annoyed by the lack of upgrade path and general smell of
crippling. Thus, I wouldn't buy one again.

Finally, an amusing story... The unit we got (and all of the units
produced then) shipped with a fairly standard motherboard. (made by
quanta IIRC). It was a server motherboard, and came with various bells
and whistles. One such bell, was IPMI. Storevault didn't use IPMI, and
it wasn't something user configurable. One day while we're testing, we
turn the storevault off and go to lunch. We come back to find the
office has no network. Digging a bit, we discover that something has
claimed 192.168.0.1, and caused unsurprisingly much unhappiness. Turns
out, when the storevault is shutdown the motherboard IMPI controller
takes over, and it was preconfigured with 192.168.0.1 as the ip
address. It took storevault a week to get the IPMI password to us so
we could fix it.


seph