[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

We recently switched (6 months ago) from NetApp to Sun & ZFS.  The
performance is so much better now, it was totally obvious to all the admins
and all the users.  We have more power, more flexibility, more portability.
Administration is dramatically easier and more flexible, meaning we can
install any monitoring tool we want, or any command line thing we want,
because it's a normal OS that can build and run apps.  Every software
license is already included, no need to a-la-carte things like snapshots and
backups and NFS and CIFS.  The cost of this system was many thousand less
than the equivalent Netapp system.  I will never go back.

Plus, Netapp screwed us on the warranty service while that machine was in
production, although I understand most people don't have that bad experience
from NetApp support, it left a very bad taste in my mouth, and many foul
words for NetApp came from me.  It took them about a month to correct their
records and reinstate our service contract.  In the end they apologized to
me and offered me a free disk, which I turned down and said the only thing I
care about is knowing this will never, ever happen again.

Local retailers that I've purchased from are Corporate Technologies, and
Continental Resources.  I would happily recommend them both.  They've both
been good for us.  I think they both retail NetApp, and Sun/Oracle.

Also, if you're adventurous, you can do this all with Solaris on a Dell.
The cost is much lower than any of the Netapp or Sun alternatives, but it's
not nearly as well supported.  You have to do crazy things like boot from
the Solaris CD on the internal optical drive, while there's a USB optical
drive attached, with a special driver in it to enable the PERC, and then
swap the CD from the internal drive to the USB drive and continue with the
OS installation.  It is officially supported and this is officially the
solution, which I learned by calling Dell support.  But my point is, it's
obvious that Solaris was rather an afterthought in the PowerEdge design, and
the end result is somewhat kludgey.  But since I know all the little booby
traps, this is likely what I will use in the future.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> Behalf Of Paul Beltrani
> Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2010 6:09 PM
> To: bblisa at bblisa.org
> Subject: [BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?
> 
> We're looking for a basic, enterprise class appliance to serve 15TB to
> 30TB of mission critical storage via NFS.   We're considering the
> offerings from NetApp and EMC but they're much more than we need. For
> example, we don't need features like mirroring or remote replication.
> 
> Would anyone care to recommend a vendor or appliance they're happy
> with?
> 
>   - Paul Beltrani
> 
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