[BBLISA] Recommendation for NAS appliance?

[John Stoffel]

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

We did a big upgrade of our Netapps as well about a year ago, and
seriously looked at the Sun solution.  What held us back up quotas and
the lack of them.  Or more accurately, the lack of quotas (even if
they were unlimited) meant that we couldn't *quickly* generate reports
showing which user(s) were taking up the most disk space.  

I did download and play with the Sun VMware image they offer for
testing, built some volumes, etc.  But the quota/reporting issues kept
us from the Sun solution.  

If you don't have anything already, and you want a nice large Box, I
think you could do alot worse than the Sun/Oracle stuff.  And ZFS with
snapshots is very interesting too.  And it should be rock solid with
NFS server as well.

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

On the other hand, Netapp's are rock solid, they just run and run and
run.  And disks are super simple to swap out when they do fail.  I
love the stability on the boxes, I've been using them since OnTap 4.x
and the F330/F740 days.  Good stuff.

BlueArc is another vendor to possibly look at too.  

Oh, one of the killer limitations with Netapp is that the maximum
Volume size is 16Tb - overhead.  Can't go past that.

And backups are sucky unless you do NDMP directly to tape.  But then
restores suck suck suck because NDMP is just an encapsulation of the
native dump/restore tools, which means scanning the tapes bit by bit
to find and restore the file(s) you want to restore.  So in that case,
snapshots make a huge difference.  Except when they expire and the
user comes the next day with a restore request.

This is one of the biggest things that people overlook when they
deploy storage like this, restore speed for single files.  

We used to just backup the Filers over NFS with EMC/Legator Networker,
which wasn't so fast on backup, but restores for single files were
quick and *easy*.  And the file indexes lastest forever, which was
nice because you could easily browse them looking for what you wanted.

I'd be happy to write even more about how I hate all backup products
if you like.  

Cheers,
John