[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[Rob Taylor]

Can you provide the spec's or models of the netapp and sun box that you
were/are using so we can get a better idea on the comparison?
Also, how many clients are accessing it?

Thanks.

rgt

On 03/03/2010 10:33 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> bblisa mailing list
>> bblisa at bblisa.org
>> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
> 
> _______________________________________________
> bblisa mailing list
> bblisa at bblisa.org
> http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa