[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[Sean Lutner]

On Aug 12, 2010, at 4:36 PM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:

> 
> 
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, Grant Young wrote:
> 
>> When you can get a basic 1TB drive for $100 at your favorite vendor it 
>> is a hard sell that data center quality costs at least 10x that.  But 
>> you definitely get what you pay for.
> 
> At 10x we would be all Netapp because it is fast and trouble-free, but the 
> Netapp quotes we get are closer to 100x raw storage cost. Perhaps we 
> aren't getting the best deals, but no prices are posted on the Netapp 
> website.

You're implying that you pay $10,000 per TB. I've seen high prices for storage from the high end vendors but absolutely nothing that approaches that. If that were true not only would you be getting monumentally ripped off, you'd be pretty foolish to boot. 
> 
> Furthermore, the annual maintainance starts at more than the purchase 
> price of raw space, and increases with time, so that after 3 years 
> maintainance cost per quarter is similar to the purchase price of raw 
> disk.

I also find this very hard to believe. There's no way you're paying $10,000 per TB in support costs per year. If you're paying more than 20% of purchase price for support you're getting ripped off.

Maybe you have/had a terrible Netapp rep/VAR.

> 
>> 
>> OTOH, I do believe you can put together a creditable alternative from 
>> parts and open source if you pay attention.  Once you've done that 
>> you'll appreciate what you get from a NetApp, EMC, HP, or whatever 
>> storage vendor you choose, in terms of manageability and support, not to 
>> mention scale and performance.
>> 
> 
> It really depends on what you need. We have Netapp storage and FreeBSD 
> storage. They each have their place. One thing I would point out is that 
> if you have an inadaquate amount of high quality storage, that is probably 
> much much worse than having plenty of low quality storage. If my disk is 
> full, that is much worse than being slow, or down a few days a year.
> 
> Too many system administrators take the view that if A is better than B, 
> then B is worthless. That isn't good logic. Not everyone needs high 
> performance for every file. A local university provides 25 meg of storage 
> on an EMC box for each faculty member. Is that the right way to spend a 
> limited amount of money?
> 
> The Netapp isn't even uniformly better than home made solutions. The home 
> made FreeBSD box draws a tenth the electricity. Is that not an advantage 
> to be weighed, even if price is no object?
> 
> Daniel Feenberg
> 
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