[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[John Orthoefer]

ZFS doesn't support Phone home.  So when the filer is having an issue a replacement part and a service tech show up and replace it for you.  

If you have monitoring infrastructure in place that that you know a failing disk will be caught and fixed before it's an issue, great.  But I've seen it before, a RAID unit silently replaces a failed disk with a hot spare, then a second disk fails and it runs in degraded mode, and then a 3rd disk fails.... oops...oh hey it's been complaining for 6 months and no one did anything about it.

Right now I don't run a Netapp, they aren't right for ALL places and all things (I'm not that big of a fanboy.)  Nor do I work for them.   But I've had a lot of success with them.  

ZFS I'm also a fan of... But once again if you are willing to spend manpower money to build something you can, and monitor and maintain it.  But I really believe the TCO of a Netapp is lower than a homebrew solution.

johno

On Aug 13, 2010, at 7:21 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

>> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
>> Behalf Of John Orthoefer
>> 
>> the 1TB SATA hard drive that you get from
>> NewEgg and xTB of disk storage you get from Netapp are NOT comparable.
> 
> I'll agree that "you get what you pay for."
> 
> But I'll say this:  Scrap netapp, and go with ZFS.  I did this about a year
> ago, and I am SOOOO happy I did.  ZFS does everything and more than netapp.
> I can run it on commodity Dell (or whatever blackbox) hardware.  I can build
> a cheap "backup" server which is regularly instantly(ish) snapshotted from
> the primary server, and all of it is migrated and stored offsite.
> 
> Seriously, the features and performance of ZFS over Netapp or EXT3/4 are
> hands-down just plain superior and awesome.
>