[BBLISA] Fwd: Re: Fileserver opinion

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

 On 8/12/10 10:48 AM, John Orthoefer wrote:

> I just have to put in my 2 bits on this.   
>
> There is a LOT of engineering that EMC and Netapp does.   I've had to fight this battle before, the 1TB 

I appreciate this and am happy to consider something in our budget of
$10k for 2-8 TB of storage.  On the flip side, we don't have a budget
for support contracts, and from what I've heard when things go wrong,
vendor support is often the only way out of the hole.

A major supercomputing centre (5600 cores) that we work with, which uses
pricey Panasas storage, has had chronic problems in July with several
days of downtime.  From what I can read into their public status
messages (http://hcc.unl.edu/hcccreditedit/messages.php), Panasas
engineers were the only ones who could do anything to fix this.  We
can't get ourselves into a situation with a piece of equipment we can't
maintain ourselves, since vendor support (unless it is 3+ years included
in purchase price within the $10k budget) is probably not possible with
our budget.

Any suggestions for "affordable" packaged storage solutions that fit
these constraints would be appreciated, otherwise we're stuck with
rolling our own.

And a note on top of that: Our issues extend beyond just purchasing a
file server.  We need to figure out the overall topology of servers,
services, and VMs, and take into consideration the very good questions
people on this list have asked us about getting some characteristics
and performance metrics for our current and anticipated workloads.

Ian


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