[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[Dean Anderson]

I've been a fan of NetApp for a long time. But I recently tried to get a
price on 10GigE, and although they list 10GigE as an option card for the
FAS2050, they couldn't give me a price. Vaporware, methinks.  There are
some other reasons I'm not so thrilled with NetApp anymore. 

But avoid linux as a NFS server platfom.  There is a funded project to
improve the client at RedHat, but not the server. Sigh.

OpenSolaris is pretty cheap if you are building your own NFS server;  
runs on x86 and has very decent performance.  My rule of thumb: If you
aren't just using your disks as a 'fast tape' for archiving, get the 15k
disks. They are usually worth the price if you have multiple users and
want high access rates.  

		--Dean

On Thu, 12 Aug 2010, 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 SATA hard drive that you get from
> NewEgg and xTB of disk storage you get from Netapp are NOT comparable.  
> There is a ton functionality that you get out of a Netapp that doesn't
> exist in a raw drive, or even with the drive plugged into a linux box
> running EXT3.
> 
> The Netapp is designed to serve data, it's kernel is tailored to get
> blocks of data off the disk and push it to the wire.  It runs a custom
> filesystem, which is where a lot of their technology is. You're never
> going to get the performance out of Linux box doing the same job
> unless you put at least a significant fraction of the man-hours that
> Netapp has put into their product in to it (and at most places People
> Time is expensive.)
> 
> Now if you have a Linux NFS/Server you are happy with, that is great.  
> But if you want a box you can drop in a datacenter, spend a few hours
> setting up, and know that you can fill the wires with data, you need
> to spend the money on a Netapp.
> 
> Yes I guess I have drank the NetApp Koolade but I've seen way too many
> places trying to make some Linux/Windows Solution work, when what they
> want is a NetApp.
> 
> johno
> 
> 
> On Aug 11, 2010, at 6:24 PM, Grant Young wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Everybody likes to rag on EMC and other storage vendors for charging so much per terabyte but they engineer the headaches out of the storage.  
> > 
> 
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